Something unusual is happening in American media. Emboldened by the eruption of a nationwide mass protest movement over the past several weeks, a new cohort of journalists have leveraged the ensuing moral and political panic to assert dominance within their organisations. Inciting internal revolts, they are rapidly seizing control.
In perhaps the surest sign of their newfound primacy, they have been not just authorised, but encouraged to participate in the ongoing protest actions. To clarify: these journalists haven’t merely been given the green-light to attend the gatherings as sympathetic observers, or even to frame their coverage in a positive light. Rather, they have been offered explicit institutional support to actively participate as protesters. (Some of these authorisations have been made public, while others have not.)
This represents quite a revolution in the prevailing mindset of mainstream media culture. Though it has exploded recently, its origins can be traced to 2016, when the rise of Donald Trump caused much of the political and media class to abandon a whole slew of reporting “norms” which had previously guided their conduct. Angered and traumatised by Trump, they adopted a radically new set of principles that would have been completely unrecognisable across the profession just a few years earlier.
Whereas in the past, journalists who challenged the establishment media’s hoary allegiance to outmoded notions of “objectivity” were in the beleaguered minority, today they are fully in the mainstream, and conventional ideas about “objectivity” are being jettisoned Left and Right. This trend is especially pronounced among the rising generation of journalists in their twenties and thirties, although older colleagues are also increasingly susceptible.
This is not altogether a bad thing: pure “objectivity” was never a viable standard in the first place, often leading to skewed editorial choices, misplaced reporting priorities, phony “false equivalence”, and poor writing. However, since 2016 there has clearly been a dramatic overcorrection: what’s also being jettisoned is any remaining fidelity to what one might call impartiality. The lack of impartiality among journalists today helps explain why the media ecosystem they inhabit has been so integral in spawning the successive waves of moral panic that have engulfed US politics and culture over the past four years.
Just because something is a moral panic doesn’t mean its proximate causes are wholly fictitious. Take several instances that have arisen since the election of Trump, all with different features, and affecting different sectors of society, but all part of the same hysterical trajectory: #MeToo, “Nazi” alarmism and Russiagate. Sexual harassment and violence obviously exist, and sometimes go unreported; there really were a small band of “alt-right” instigators who gathered online and in person, inspired at least in part by Trump’s political success; and it is true that “Russian bots” probably do exist on social media to some negligible degree.
Even so, all three of these phenomena took on straightforward qualities of moral panic, namely: wildly exaggerated claims with little or no connection to the facts at hand, prophecies of terrifying apocalyptic threats, public shaming rituals, thinly-veiled political and interpersonal score-settling, relentless policing of private beliefs and attitudes, and an all-encompassing, irrational, accusatory frenzy.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe