Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn Is The Latest Target Of Post-Truth Journalism – Wirepoints

*Mark Glennon*

I still find this almost unbelievable – honest-to-goodness unbelievable – but there’s an expanding, serious school of thought in journalism that openly says facts and objectivity don’t matter. What’s more important, they say, is affirming a social justice narrative even when the facts don’t fit.

That viewpoint is supported by some of America’s leading figures in the field including some faculty at top journalism schools. It’s often called “advocacy journalism” but “post-truth journalism” is more like it.

The first example is a recent one from here in Illinois, and it has gotten some national attention. The victim this time was from the political left, the Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn, so maybe this incident will rekindle the debate over journalism’s sad direction.

It’s about Zorn’s column last week titled, “Resolved, that Americans need to learn how to debate again.”

Zorn recounted how he found himself “at the bottom of a Twitter dogpile” in April after he wrote a to say that it would be nice to get the police bodycam evidence before drawing conclusions about what happened in the Adam Toledo tragedy. Activists were already framing it as a police murder.

“For this I was branded a racist and a monster whose own children should be killed so I’d know how it feels,” says Zorn.

Among those infuriated that the evidence should matter was Steven Thrasher. He’s “the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting” and an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Thrasher tweeted that “there is no space in a newspaper for arguing for the murder of a child, and that it’s ‘never too early’ to think they are worthy of murder” so he was cancelling his Tribune subscription, Zorn wrote. In other words, screw the facts. Just say the cops committed murder.

Zorn says he reached out to Thrasher a month later to try for a more reasoned discussion. “I attempted to start that exchange, Zorn says, by saying that ‘one of the jobs of a journalist is to question and challenge emerging narratives and conventional wisdom, to be clear about what we know for sure and what we suspect.’”

Here’s the response Zorn got from the esteemed professor: “Your words make the murder of children more likely, and I have no interest in you, your unethical nature, your cynical worldview, or in communicating with you.” The College Fix published some of Thrasher’s other astonishing comments about the “racist” (according to Thrasher) Zorn.

Legal commentator Jonathan Turley picked up on Zorn’s column and wrote this week providing examples of other leading figures in journalism who are part of the post-truth world. From that and one of Turley’s earlier columns:

• Stanford Communications Professor Emeritus Ted Glasser has publicly called for an end of objectivity in journalism as too constraining for reporters in seeking social justice…. “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

• Wesley Lowery, who has served as a national correspondent for the Washington Post, also rejects objectivity. In a tweet, Lowery declared “American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment…The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.”

• Even the publishing of opposing views is now considered dangerous as shown by the removal of New York Times editor James Bennet, who resigned in the recent controversy over an editorial by Sen. Tom Cotton.

• The University of North Carolina recently offered an academic chair in Journalism to New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories.

How on earth do people like Thrasher, Hannah-Jones, Glasser and Lowery get leading positions in journalism? What was historically ridiculed as “yellow journalism” is now promoted at the top ranks of national journalism.

Getting back to Zorn, I’m giving him a salute. He’s among those leaving the Tribune in the recent series of buyout retirements. That has thrilled a few of our readers here who don’t like his left-wing politics.

We don’t share his politics either, but Zorn has been among the few on his side who at least tries to make his case with facts. We’ve ripped him when thought he got the facts wrong or didn’t get the whole story, but that’s what makes for productive debates. So many other columnists just seem to roll out of bed and tell you how they “feel” about something or share some sappy story about their aunt so-and-so’s recent trauma of some kind.

More to the point, Zorn’s column about the Thrasher incident is right on: People need to learn how to debate again, and you can’t have a debate with anybody who rejects the primal importance of facts and objectivity.

We saw a ray of hope recently when WTTW canned its news director, Hugo Balta. He whined afterward that, “Throughout my career, I have vocalized my commitment to a mission of transparency over the antiquated practices of objectivity.” [Emphasis added.] Every news outlet and journalism school should likewise be showing post-truthers the door.

Zorn ended his column on the right note:

The part of me that’s not disheartened by this still believes in the healing power of spirited dialogue. It continues to hope for a reemergence of fearless, rational discourse about challenging arguments, even stinky ones.

Maybe this will be the first of our columns that he doesn’t think is stinky.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.