Reporting Right on Extremism
Reporting Right on Extremism
Top Story: Reporting Right on Extremism
Reporting Right has its allies — journalists and editors — who are fighting misinformation in the news.
Veteran journalist Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, is one of them. Jacob writes Stop the Presses, a newsletter focused on right-wing radicalism and the media.
Jacob is honest, demanding, and often critical of the way journalism is being done these days. Exactly, the way a good editor ought to be.
So, Reporting Right sat down with Jacob for a chat. Here are a few of the wise things he had to say:
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Just writing things down isn’t enough.
Journalism is supposed to be an account of what happened, while giving [what happened] context and giving it insight.
Truth-telling is the job.
One of the big things that journalists are supposed to do is to say what's true and what’s not true.
Journalists are not supposed to [report] what some person thinks is true.
Fairness is not giving a liar equal weight with someone who is telling the truth.
Fairness for journalists is to be fair to the audience, to be fair to your readers, not to your sources. [Readers are] who you owe something to. They are who you're working for.
Contextualizing is not editorializing.
The value-add that journalists can bring is historical context.
Being on the side of truth is not a partisan position.
You have some journalists who think they've got to be objective on the question of truth versus lies. And that's a scary place to be. I mean, think about that…Well, you know we’ve got to give the liar over here equal say with that person who's telling the truth.
No, you don't.
Fact crusading is what journalists need to do.
We need to be relentless and we need to defend the truth.
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Don’t Do This
Call a sexual predator and former president…just a guy with a libertine streak. (We’re looking at you New York Times.)
Confuse “free-speech” with right-wing efforts to bring extremist groups to American campuses. Even if the American Bar Association falls for the savvy packaging, doesn’t mean a working journalist — paid to know what’s going on — ought to. (Reuters gets an F.)
Cover elections like they’re horse-races; using unreliable polls, again!
Call Dearborn, “America's Jihad Capital.” (Thanks Wall Street Journal.) There are real consequences.
We’re Watching
Mark Jacob and Steven Beschloss take down bad stories, sometimes by good writers in this sometimes sadly funny series on Jacob’s Substack Stop The Presses.
ALSO IN THE NEWS
Tennessee governor’s love affair with vouchers.
WE’RE READING
“Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation”
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Our Staff
Executive Editor Kyle Spencer
Managing Editor Christen Gall
Our Board of Advisors
Alex Aronson, executive director of Court Accountability
David Armiak, research director for the Center for Media and Democracy
Lisa Graves, founder and executive director of True North Research
Connor Gibson, founder of Grassrootbeer Investigations
Maurice Cunningham, retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and author of Dark Money and The Politics of School Privatization.
Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College, founder of Faculty First Responders and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Ralph Wilson, founder of the Corporate Genome Project and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
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