Words: Alessandro Peacock (he/him)
One piece of ‘pure’ investigative journalism in a legacy media outlet does not exonerate the rest
Once upon a time, journalism was driven by a singular purpose: telling the truth. Today, legacy media has become de-purified, lacking a concrete commitment to integrity and minimising, or blatantly failing to report on, the most salient issues of our time. What does it say about journalism when the ‘impartial’ BBC reported on ICE’s murder of Alex Pretti as merely a ‘death’? The dilution of journalistic integrity is not new; our parents’ and grandparents’ generations began to uncover embedded corruption years ago. If no one believes legacy media is ‘pure’ anymore, where should we turn for our news?
Our grandparents’ generation first glimpsed the ‘impurity’ permeating the media industry during the Vietnam War. Originally, the My Lai massacre of 1968 was buried in the back pages of The New York Times, and diminished in severity. It was not a massacre – just an ‘incident’ – where an unspecified number of civilians died. Freelance investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was determined to expose the true nature of the massacre. His scathing report appeared in over 35 national newspapers and shocked Americans, laying bare the corruption in The Times’ editorial hierarchy in the process. While history often portrays Hersh’s revelation as a turning point for journalism, one that put integrity back on the main stage, Chomsky and Herman refute this notion. In Manufacturing Consent, they argue that Hersh’s exposé, though vital, was ultimately not enough to knock journalistic corruption off of its pedestal.
Our parents’ generation arguably identified media ‘impurity’ in greater numbers. Those opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq were aware of the media’s role in manufacturing consent for the war from its inception. As the conflict unravelled, even those initially in favour of the invasion realised the extent to which the media had laundered American propaganda about WMD (weapons of mass destruction), and lost trust in its credibility as a result. Pieces like Hersh’s 2004 report of the US military’s use of torture at Abu Ghraib, published in The New Yorker, helped to display the bloody consequences of the invasion on the Iraqi people.
One piece of ‘pure’ investigative journalism in a legacy media outlet does not exonerate the rest, however. Less than a year earlier, Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times that, regardless of WMD, the West was right to invade Iraq. A year before that, he won a Pulitzer Prize after calling 9/11 ‘the Pearl Harbor of WWII’, wherein the West’s enemies were the ‘super-empowered angry people’ that ‘hail from failing states in the Muslim and third world’. To this day, Friedman remains one of The Times’ most influential columnists.
While our parents’ and grandparents’ generations grew up with legacy media that occasionally fought back against the state, the same cannot be said for our generation. The quality of legacy media, and faith in it, has been in a constant state of decline. Why is it that legacy media organisations have become increasingly sanitised in their reporting? The answer lies with a fear of retaliation from powerful forces. After calling Trump a rapist, ABC were forced to settle a defamation lawsuit, illegitimately pushed for by the President and condemned by other legacy media outlets. CBS were forced to do the same over the ‘malicious intent’ present in their editing of the President’s speeches in their 60 Minutes segment. More recently, the BBC had its Director General and News CEO resign over a similar incident. In the latter cases, legacy media behemoths followed standard editing practices, but were bullied into abandoning the ‘pure’ media gold standards that we have enjoyed for decades.
Although it is deplorable that Trump and other powerful figures are trying to censor legacy media institutions, it is equally deplorable that these so-called ‘bastions’ of truth are not fighting back. The New York Times’ recent ‘investigation’ into Trump’s crypto-czar, though interesting, was barely hard-hitting journalism. Where is the critical, investigative presence of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, or Seymour Hersh? CBS, bought out by Trump’s allies, now espouses pro-ICE rhetoric uncritically on the Evening News. The BBC is no better – it has failed to fairly cover the genocide in Gaza. In broadcasts, murders are reported merely as ‘deaths’, and Gaza is simply ‘Hamas-controlled’. This treatment manufactures apathy for Palestinians living in the Strip, and reduces perhaps the defining issue of our time to a mere ‘conflict’ of two equal sides. Meanwhile, the network uses deliberately empathetic language for Israelis – so much for impartiality.
Legacy media has declined in both credibility and output in the post-Trump world. Looking at history shows us that the media is not suddenly becoming ‘impure’, but rather it is becoming the ‘purest’ version of a machine designed to manufacture consent for the political classes. As legacy media becomes more overtly billionaire-inclined, we must support independent critical journalists carrying our elders’ legacy of firebrand journalism.
