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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 3/15/16

The Rise of Trump Shows the Danger and Sham of Compelled Journalistic "Neutrality"

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As Donald Trump's campaign predictably moves from toxic rhetoric targeting the most marginalized minorities to threats and use of violence, there is a growing sense that American institutions have been too lax about resisting it. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan on Sunday posted a widely cited Twitter essay voicing this concern, arguing that "Trump's rise represents a failure in American parties, media, and civic institutions -- and they're continuing to fail right now." He added, "Someone could capture a major party [nomination] who endorses violence [and] few seem alarmed."

Actually, many people are alarmed, but it is difficult to know that by observing media coverage, where little journalistic alarm over Trump is expressed. That's because the rules of large media outlets -- venerating faux objectivity over truth along with every other civic value -- prohibit the sounding of any alarms. Under this framework of corporate journalism, to denounce Trump, or even to sound alarms about the dark forces he's exploiting and unleashing, would not constitute journalism. To the contrary, such behavior is regarded as a violation of journalism. Such denunciations are scorned as opinion, activism, and bias: all the values that large media-owning corporations have posited as the antithesis of journalism in order to defang and neuter it as an adversarial force.

Just this morning, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik published a story describing the concern and even anger of some NPR executives and journalists over a column by longtime NPR commentator Cokie Roberts -- the Beacon of Washington Centrism -- that criticizes Trump. "NPR has a policy forbidding its journalists from taking public stances on political affairs," he wrote. For any NPR reporter, Roberts's statements -- warning of the dangers of a Trump presidency -- would be a clear violation of that policy.

An NPR vice president, Michael Oreskes, published an internal memo to NPR staff this morning highlighting Roberts's non-reporting and non-employee role as a reason she would not be punished, but he pointedly noted, "If Cokie were still a member of NPR's staff we would not have allowed that." And in an interview that Oreskes "directed" Roberts to do this morning with Morning Edition host David Greene about the matter, the NPR host chided Roberts for expressing negative views of Trump, telling her:

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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.

Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive (more...)
 

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