Why Did the Media Botch Covington? Lack of Diversity

By now, it is widely accepted that the mainstream media botched the Covington Catholic School story. The real question is, Why? How could they screw it up so badly?

It’s not enough to blame social media. Twitter is a tool, not a person. Journalists are human beings who make choices; they can’t help but be influenced by their worldviews. We should stop pretending that journalists seek only facts, balance and fairness. There are certainly journalists who aim for those high standards, but the majority are fallible human beings attached to their worldviews. In the age of Trump, this attachment has been especially difficult to hide, both from the right and the left.

As Frank Bruni courageously wrote in The New York Times:

“We react to news by trying to fit it into the argument that we routinely make, the grievance that we usually raise, the fury or angst or sorrow that we typically peddle. We have our narrative, and we’re on the lookout for comments and developments that back it up. The response to the initial footage of the Covington boys — and, in particular, to the one who wore a red MAGA cap as he stood before and stared at the drumming veteran — adhered to this dynamic.”

In a blistering takedown in The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan asks:

“How could the elite media—The New York Times, let’s say—have protected themselves from this event, which has served to reinforce millions of Americans’ belief that traditional journalistic outlets are purveyors of ‘fake news’? They might have hewed to a concept that once went by the quaint term ‘journalistic ethics.’ Among other things, journalistic ethics held that if you didn’t have the reporting to support a story, and if that story had the potential to hurt its subjects, and if those subjects were private citizens, and if they were moreover minors, you didn’t run the story. You kept reporting it; you let yourself get scooped; and you accepted that speed is not the highest value. Otherwise, you were the trash press.”

Does anyone believe that all this soul searching will prevent another Covington debacle? Not when you consider the built-in incentives to maintain the status quo, as Bruni writes:

“With everything from Twitter followers to television bookings, we’re rewarded for fierce conviction, for utter certainty, for emphatically taking sides and staying unconditionally faithful to what we’ve pushed for and against in the past. We each have our brand, and the narrower and more unyielding it is, the more currency it has and the more loyal our consumers. Instead of bucking the political tribalism in America, we ride it.”

Each media outlet, from Fox to MSNBC, from Breitbart to The Washington Post, has its own lucrative “brand.” These brands are very much based on ideological consistency. If you introduce too much ideological diversity, you risk diluting your brand, as if we’re selling cake mix that promises consistency.

As David French writes in National Review Online, “So long as our nation’s newsrooms are ideological monocultures, not even the best of intentions can block the formation of a partisan press.”

An ideal newsroom should include liberal, conservative and centrist reporters. An ideal editor-in-chief should ensure that a broad ideological perspective is brought to its reporting. Of course, that’s hard to do when the great majority of your reporters see things the same way.

You can argue that ideological diversity is probably more important than any other. I would rather be defined by how I think and write and act than by my Jewish-Sephardic ethnic heritage. That ought to be true of every reporter or commentator.

As French writes, modern newsrooms “diligently seek to hire reporters from historically marginalized communities. They do not, however, apply the same diligence to hiring people who come from the intellectual and religious communities on the other side of the great American divide. This creates yawning gaps of ignorance.”

Academia has led the way in this narrow definition of diversity. As Heather MacDonald writes in her book, “The Diversity Delusion”:

“The roots lie in a charged set of ideas that now dominate higher education: that human beings are defined by their skin color, sex, and sexual preference; that discrimination based on those characteristics has been the driving force in Western civilization.”

News media organizations have an obligation to buck this trend and bring ideological diversity into their newsrooms. It may dilute their brand, but journalism should not be marketing. We’re selling truth and fairness and credibility, not Doritos.

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