In 1972, at the University of Georgia, our college newspaper staff opposed the proposal to change the name of the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism to the Henry W. Grady School of Mass Communications. Our reasoning was that journalism implies “truth” while “mass communications” does not.
After all, the worst propaganda is still “communications.”
I think of that often these days, given what I see in the mainstream press every day, where the whole truth often is missing in action.
Take, for example, the huge national story that ensued when Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson suggested that people confronted by an armed mass killer should do something more than “just stand there” waiting to be shot.
The media reacted with feigned horror, accusing him of showing a lack of respect for the people killed in the campus shooting in Roseburg, Ore., and saying that what he was suggesting was totally outrageous and unreasonable.
But then, on its Nov. 22 show, “60 Minutes” interviewed Washington, D.C., police chief Cathy Lanier, who said killing or subduing a killer in such situations would be the “best option for saving lives before police can get there.” The same nabobs who excoriated Carson for suggesting the same thing strangely had no comment. Even the “60 Minutes” correspondent never batted an eye when Lanier suggested the identical advice offered by Carson six weeks earlier.
Here’s another example of truth being a casualty in reporting. Republicans, joined by 47 Democrats, voted in the U.S. House last month to put a hold on the Syrian refugee program until it can be determined that the vetting process would catch Islamist terrorists using the refugee crisis as a means to enter the United States.
President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, along with most media commentators, criticized those urging caution of abandoning American values and being callous toward “widows and orphans,” to use Obama’s terms.
However, in 2011, it was Obama and the State Department, under Clinton’s leadership, who halted the processing of Iraqi refugees for six months after it was discovered that terrorists had used the program to enter the country to commit terrorist attacks.
The media had a bout of amnesia again, never mentioning that Obama and Clinton had done exactly what they, and the media, were criticizing Republicans and others for wanting to do with regard to the Syrians. They also failed to point out an ABC News report from 2013 that found that “dozens of terrorists” had entered the country under the Obama program for Iraqi refugees.
The media failed to put truth in the forefront in these reports. As a result, their selective reporting seemed more like propaganda than journalism.
Jon Ham (@rivlax) is a vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.