Then I would look to my favorite journalists, aspiring to have the qualities they had, whatever they were. I was puzzled over how they could speak truth to power to flawlessly, every paragraph ended in a mic drop that I could never master.
If I may be so presumptuous, this notion of the journalist’s mission as “to speak truth to power” is a relatively recent innovation, and is not by any indication working out all that well for journalism’s credibility.
The older-schooled version of the journalist’s craft, was based on a simple formula: “who, what, where, when, how.” Notice, that “why” does not make the list. The business of “why” crosses the line out of genuine journalism, of reporting the facts of a story as accurately and supportably-sourced as possible, into a realm of analysis, of op-ed, of punditry, and worst of all for the credibility of reportage as a whole, into activism.
Speaking truth to power is necessarily a grave violation of another of the longstanding principles of good journalism:
never make yourself a part of the story.
As I remember, although she may not have first coined the phrase, the one who immortalized it was Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. Maybe you admire her work, maybe her speaking her truth to the powers she chooses as targets makes for a fun drive home with the radio on Pacifica, but Amy Goodman is no journalist. She is the very prototype and archetype of the analyst-pundit-op-edster-activist, and adds it all together into being something even less a journalist:
she is an entertainer.
Who decided anyway, that to report the news has anything even remotely to do with this “speak truth to power?” And, how’s that working out for journalism? This past election was the most disgraceful display of journalistic integrity gleefully abandoned by the entire industry, probably in recorded history. Thanks to preposterous venues like Twitter and farcebook, every halfwit with a byline all of a sudden became a “personal brand” straining day in and day out for personalized approval ratings from imaginary fan clubs, and in the process as much as mocking the idea that to report the news, is to tell the factual structure of who, what, where, when and how.
You can do whatever you like and call it journalism nowadays. But speaking truth to power is so far-removed from what journalism ever was until the social media age, and its attendant vainglorious personal conceits, by entertainers making themselves the subject of EVERY story, that it hurts my eyes to see this called “journalism.”
