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. But Wilder’s mistake was bigger than that. Not only was she failing to uphold journalistic objectivity by sounding off about a sensitive issue while still a cub reporter, she also derided the AP’s very commitment to objectivity. “‘Objectivity’ feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report news implicitly take a claim,” she tweeted, making an argument at once convoluted and sophomoric. “Using ‘israel’ but never ‘palestine,’ or ‘war’ but not ‘siege and occupation’ are political choices — yet media make those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased.” Setting aside Wilder’s confusions about the Middle East — the AP does, for example, use the terms “occupation” and “siege” — her words showed no appreciation that editors at the Associated Press, as at most top-tier news outlets, think hard about and often revisit the content of their stylebooks: when to say “war” and when to say “occupation,” when to use “Palestine” and when to avoid it. It is precisely because of this diligence that the wire service is rarely “flagged as biased.” Most of us would agree that the AP’s blue-chip reputation for telling it like it is — which endures, for the most part, even in our age of near-total politicization — is a good thing. The world needs high-quality professional reporting on issues far and wide, presented in a way that diverse readers can trust as accurate and not colored by politics. For over one hundred seventy years, the AP has shared its stories with hundreds and even thousands of subscribing newspapers, radio and TV stations, and web portals. Small-town dailies use it as their prime source of foreign and national news. Its analyses of election outcomes are so well respected that almost everyone else relies on them. It was not surprising, then, that the AP fired Wilder. “Emily Wilder was let go because she had a series of social media posts that showed a clear bias toward one side and against another in one of the most divisive and difficult stories we cover,” Brian Carovillano, the AP’s managing editor, explained. That didn’t stop a mudslide of hypocritical outrage. On the right, fair-weather free-speech fans wallowed in her dismissal. On the left, pundits who had pitilessly shrugged off scores of unfair firings piously intoned that no one should be punished for expressing opinions. And they had a point: Wilder’s superiors could have simply reprimanded her and suspended her from Twitter until she recommitted to her organization’s rules. Beyond the politics of cancellation, however, there was a larger inconsistency at work. That inconsistency concerned journalistic objectivity. Wilder’s firing came as most liberals were lamenting — properly — the collapse of trust in mainstream journalism. Over several years, millions of Americans had forsaken their faith in the traditional “objective” news providers, which they came to conclude were ideologically skewed. As institutions ceded their nonpartisan reputations, willingly or unwillingly, the void was filled by mostly inferior news sources: partisan mouthpieces, fulminating talking heads, trashy internet sites, amateur punditry, dashed-off Facebook comments, unverified viral retweets, late-night comedians, state-of-the-art misinformation, out-and-out fake news, and other varieties of click bait. The consequences are well-known and grim. We saw that when a huge portion of the citizenry, prodded by Donald Trump and his apparatchiks, determined the coronavirus pandemic to be a giant hoax. That delusion led many to spurn medical advice to get vaccinated, deepening the crisis. Indeed, throughout the pandemic, the breakdown of trust in journalism helped to politicize the
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