On the importance of moral clarity in the news

[Nevilledog]

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Jared Holt
@jaredlholt
What the US needs from national news in this moment is not "balance" but instead a foundation of moral clarity. When anti-democracy forces make their next pass, "both sides" won't get us through. It'll be knowing right and wrong.

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On the importance of moral clarity in the news
It’s crucial to stand by our informed judgment of what’s right and wrong when people seek to undermine us by screaming “bias”
shtpost.substack.com
9:42 AM · Oct 8, 2021

https://shtpost.substack.com/p/on-the-importance-of-moral-clarity

The national media industry, particularly the part of it involved in Washington politics, too often self-sabotages in the interest of “balance”: an ostensibly noble if impossible-to-realize ideal of editorial neutrality and fairness. This ideal is not meeting the moment, and that should concern us. The press can do better. It must do better. What we need instead of a show of indifference in this moment is something greater: moral clarity.

Moral clarity is crucial in any work, and it's essential for researching domestic extremism. Unearthing the nefarious workings of dangerous movements often provokes reaction from an opposition. The blowback occasionally takes the form of violent threats, but more often it comes as efforts to personally discredit those putting in the work.

By this point in my career, I have been on the receiving end of a whole grab-bag of baseless accusations, but the one I see most often is that I’m a simple partisan activist, and that means my trustworthiness as a source of information is in doubt. Being labeled and dismissed like that used to bother me, particularly when I was newer to the line of work I’m in now. I worried that journalists and editors at places where I aspired to work saw the subjects of my research and reporting lashing out at me online, and that it contributed to at least some editors brushing my cover letters off their desks.

But eventually, whether or not I was really losing out on jobs because of my perceived politics, I learned to tune out the possibility. I knew what I was talking about and decided to operate from my own understanding of right and wrong rather than try to predict anyone else’s perception of my work. The largest and most dangerous extremist threat in the US was and still is right-wing extremism, and if sticking to that truth and working against it makes me “partisan,” then so be it. I’ll be damned for wanting the world to be a safer and fairer place, and I’ll slither back to the place I’ve earned in hell with the smile that comes from the joy of a good fight.

*snip*

[Budi]

1. No wonder the Corporate Owned Media ran a 24/7 campaign against the candidate who called for ...

...The Fairness Doctrine.
Well aware of who owns that Corporate Media.

HRC would endorse this statement:

"The largest and most dangerous extremist threat in the US was and still is right-wing extremism, and if sticking to that truth and working against it makes me “partisan,” then so be it.
I’ll be damned for wanting the world to be a safer and fairer place, and I’ll slither back to the place I’ve earned in hell with the smile that comes from the joy of a good fight."