The War on Objectivity in American Journalism

In May 2021, a newly hired journalist at the Associated Press, a twenty-two-year-old Stanford graduate named Emily Wilder, began posting provocative musings on Twitter about fighting between Israel and Hamas. Wilder had not been assigned to write about the Middle East. She may have thought she was tweeting as a private citizen. But the Associated Press had just reminded its employees that they are prohibited “from openly expressing their opinions on political matters and other public issues,” as the wire service reported about her case, “for fear that could damage the news organization’s reputation for objectivity and jeopardize its many reporters around the world.” Two weeks on the job, Wilder had run afoul of one of her employer’s sacrosanct rules.

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