In this WaPo article concerning the Vietnam War and the role journalism played in it, Joel Achenbach writes a paragraph of painful content:
Cronkite’s great persuasive power emerged from his long history of not attempting to be persuasive at all. That allowed him to fly to Vietnam like an intercontinental ballistic missile of objectivity. But the past half century has seen a steady erosion in the trust Americans place in institutions such as the news media. Partisan journalists, wielding verbal flamethrowers, view their “objective” counterparts as retailers of false balance. The media culture no longer requires or wants someone with the authority to say, as Cronkite did every night at the close of his broadcast, “And that’s the way it is . . .”
A partisan, at its heart, is someone with a viewpoint of what is desired, not what is. A partisan denies or wishes to reshape reality. And that makes the statement partisan journalist, at best, a misnomer; at worst, it’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, a phrase embraced by those who should deserve no trust at all. They can be pundits, opinion column writers, honorable to greater or lesser degrees, but journalists should be dedicated to gathering and disseminating factual material.
