To safe­guard his job, the for­eign edi­tor in Eve­lyn Waugh’s “Scoop” par­ries  his proprietor’s patent­ly idi­ot­ic ideas by reply­ing: “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

Today’s ver­sion of the hap­less edi­tor are the news exec­u­tives so craven they will­ing­ly allow politi­cians and polemi­cists to say what­ev­er they want, includ­ing dis­tor­tions and out­right lies, with­out insist­ing on instant fact-checking.
The most egre­gious, but by no means unique offend­ers, are in TV news.
Waugh’s satire on for­eign report­ing is set in a minor war in a fic­tion­al African coun­try. It is how­ev­er, wide­ly held to be a thin­ly-dis­guised ver­sion of his expe­ri­ence of cov­er­ing Mussolini’s inva­sion of what is now Ethiopia in 1935, when sto­ries arrived on the front page days after they were report­ed and filed.
In Scoop’s cut-throat, com­pet­i­tive jour­nal­is­tic world,  no one paid the slight­est heed to the adage: “A lie can trav­el half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
It’s attrib­uted to Mark Twain, but research has traced it to  Eng­lish satirist Jonathan Swift, who died 90 years before the great Amer­i­can writer was born, which goes some way to prov­ing the truth of the premise.

               THE MODERN VERSION

In a world of instant news on a rolling 24-hour cycle, beset by wars, cli­mate change, tee­ter­ing economies, reli­gion-dri­ven ide­olo­gies and cesspool-lev­el cam­paign­ing, one would hope the les­son had been learned.
Instead, we are cursed with media “pro­pri­etors” who wor­ship at the altar of their Waugh-era predecessors.
Think­ing, or claim­ing that false or mis­lead­ing state­ments can be effec­tive­ly parsed and cor­rect­ed lat­er, is the equiv­a­lent of putting out an emer­gency alert by way of a town crier and a mes­sen­ger on horseback.
Politi­cians and their han­dlers don’t want fact-check­ing because they have every inten­tion of lying, and/or are inca­pable of not doing so.
One way to put them in their place, is to promise that only obvi­ous trans­gres­sions will be fact-checked when uttered. Being ser­i­al promise ‑break­ers, won’t believe it, but who could argue with that if it’s only going to skew­er  your opponent?
Well…in a post on “X” about why can­di­date  Don­ald Trump wouldn’t sit down  for the tra­di­tion­al pre-elec­tion inter­view with CBS “60 Min­utes”,  his cam­paign man­ag­er Steven Che­ung  com­plained: “They also insist­ed on doing live fact check­ing, which is unprece­dent­ed.” Actu­al­ly, it’s not, but the way things are going, it  may from hence­forth be so.

       HOW THE MIGHTY HAS FALLEN

CBS News exec­u­tive Adri­enne Roark said in an inter­nal review, that a morn­ing news inter­view with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his book on the West Bank, was not in line with the network’s com­mit­ment to neutrality.
“We all must con­duct our­selves in a way that avoids rais­ing any ques­tions about our jour­nal­is­tic inde­pen­dence and integri­ty,” Roark said. “We have to check our bias­es at the door.”
The super­fi­cial­i­ty of that leads me to con­clude Ms Roark has nev­er report­ed a news sto­ry, or con­duct­ed a prop­er interview.
Allow­ing peo­ple with an agen­da, how­ev­er jus­ti­fied, to con­trol the nar­ra­tive is an abro­ga­tion of respon­si­bil­i­ty and good jour­nal­is­tic perspective.
Sid­ing with an author bitch­ing because an inter­view that gave him mas­sive free pub­lic­i­ty didn’t include the soft­balls he expect­ed,  instead of back­ing your jour­nal­ist, is pathetic.
As for “bias­es”; like every­one else, jour­nal­ists are the prod­uct of their back­ground, core beliefs, and per­son­al sit­u­a­tions, Our chal­lenge is to ensure that while they guide, they do not gov­ern the way we approach a story.
As  French writer Mar­guerite Duras: put it: “Jour­nal­ism with­out a moral posi­tion is impos­si­ble. Every jour­nal­ist is a moral­ist. It’s absolute­ly unavoidable.”
That does not obvi­ate the need for stan­dards, however.
Apply­ing them with more rigour and less tol­er­ance of infrac­tions is more nec­es­sary than ever as we stare into the abyss of mod­ern politics.
Than­k­ful­ly, there are still jour­nal­ists at CBS who not only know that, but have the grit to say it out loud. CBS Legal Cor­re­spon­dent Jan Craw­ford argued on behalf of her col­league: “It’s my under­stand­ing that as jour­nal­ists we are oblig­at­ed to chal­lenge that world­view so that our view­ers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more bal­anced account. And to me, that is what Tony (Dok­oupil) did.”
In the new world of con­glom­er­ate-owned, prof­it-dri­ven jour­nal­ism, she will no doubt pay a price for liv­ing up to the stan­dards and lega­cy of Edward R .Mur­row, Wal­ter Cronkite, et al.
Social media, on the oth­er hand, should have no say. The inter­view in ques­tion was met with an imme­di­ate back­lash that includ­ed online  charges the guest was ambushed, and com­plaints that the inter­view­er had a con­flict of inter­est because he has two chil­dren who live in Israel.
Bow­ing to social media and wal­low­ing in angst over fact-check­ing polit­i­cal inter­views and debates as they hap­pen, shows the intel­lec­tu­al depth of  a text message.
Report­ing and broad­cast­ing state­ments and claims by politi­cians that are patent­ly and demon­stra­bly false or mis­lead­ing with­out a caveat in the same para­graph is a step down from “Up to a point,  Lord Cop­per.” 

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