If there is one development over the last few years that should openly concern opinion writers, it is the alarming weaponization of thought in the public square.
Nowhere has this been more prevalent than in the rise of social media as a political tool, much less in the current trend of “fake news” sites that have not only proliferated within Facebook, but are making their purveyors quite a mint on the side with their approach to truthiness in the pursuit of political ends.
Bret Stephens over at The Wall Street Journal offers some worthwhile thoughts on what is wrong with the state of affairs in modern journalism:
What a columnist owes his readers isn’t a bid for their constant agreement. It’s independent judgment. Opinion journalism is still journalism, not agitprop. The elision of that distinction and the rise of malevolent propaganda outfits such as Breitbart News is one of the most baleful trends of modern life. Serious columnists must resist it.
One item that Stephens helpfully points out is the moral duty of the opinion writer to call it as they see it — to be a bit bold, a bit reckless, a bit fearless in their effort to throw an elbow or two in the defense of what is true, upright, and real:
Columnists owe their readers a moral voice. If get-in-line Republican leaders won’t . . . it falls to the columnists they likely read to do so.
Of course, Stephens’ target in all of this is Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon, recently appointed as special counselor to the newly-incoming president — while well directed, it muddies up the point we want to emphasize here.
The real catch to all of this? In Virginia, we have watched as opinion leaders both in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere have bled themselves or sold out, either for paycheck or faction, and at times to the lowest bidder on the moral scale of things.
Yet there are a handful of us who still believe in speaking truth to power just as vociferously as speaking truth to ignorance — even the willful sort. That is perhaps more important than what seems to have prevailed in the past, either as a simulacrum of the mainstream media or a halfway house to identity journalism a la Breitbart.
What’s more, if conservatives are to have and maintain a genuine voice in the public square, it has to be both open and fearless. Trump’s movement is a vehicle, not a force for conservatism. Likewise in Virginia, our elected officials serve as a vehicle for our values, not the reason why our values exist.
If there is one key to the rise of nationalism and populism in America, it is that alone — that our values do not exist to serve or be manipulated by the ruling elite. Rather, our elected officials should be the manifestation of those values in the public square.
When conservatives forget this, when the moral voice of opinion journalism succumbs to bureaucracy or settles for mediocrity, we lose the very reason why we were ever involved in public life. The flaws among the blogerati and opinion columnists, the insatiable demand to conform, guarantees the failure of the weakness attempting to enforce the status quo.
“A good newspaper,” Arthur Miller said, “is a nation talking to itself,” quotes Stephens — and rightly so. Americans deserve better, Virginians expect better. What’s more, we have a moral duty to deliver better.