There was a great piece in the New Yorker by staff writer Masha Gessen on June 24 titled Why Are Some Journalists Afraid of “Moral Clarity”?
In the piece, the writer discusses the concept and some of the backlash against it.
The term “moral clarity” has been around the block a few times, but could arguably be said to have been pushed into the mainstream when Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery (who won the award for reporting on the systematic nature of police killings of black people) used it in a tweet about the New York Times decision to run an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton, that suggested using military force to stop protests against police brutality against people of color (no irony there, nope, none at all).
Lowery wrote that the U.S. media’s “view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism” was not working, and said, “We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.”
His point is that the current “both-sides are equal we can’t tell you one side is full of shit even when they are obviously so” journalism doesn’t work when there are bad-faith actors involved.
Now anyone familiar with my writing knows I’ve been harping on this subject for at least a decade. But note how much more succinct Moral Clarity is than any of my descriptions. This is why I leave catchy phrase development to Joe Williams, who could write a slogan about actual steaming piles of excrement that upon hearing it once you would remember fondly.
The basic concept is that there are certain moral imperatives that are non-debatable and that as journalists, we should not fall into the trap that the very concept of debate is so sacred we must accept debating them as legitimate. As an example, we have decided as a society that murder is a heinous crime. We don’t write news articles about the debate between people who believe murder is a crime and people who don’t.
But over time, and in response to a consistent wave of attacks from right-wing extremists, journalists have slowly retreated from that standard in many areas, to the point that to me, is shocking. We should not be debating whether White Supremacism is a legitimate, acceptable belief system in an open multi-racial democracy. But we now have a president who said there are “very fine people” on both sides of that debate.
And we are currently having debates as to whether black people deserve to die at the hands of police arresting them for minor infractions (or just performing a traffic stop). The next time it happens, count the hours between when the death is reported, and when every bit of the murdered person’s history is dredged up as his corpse is dragged through the mud by police brutality apologists.
Of course the simple concept that police should not be free to execute the citizens they are hired to protect, expressed in the two words “Moral Clarity,” like any catchy slogan, is so dangerous to those who succeed by obfuscating their heinousness through meaningless debate that they were quick to jump on it and try to mischaracterize it, lest it catch on.
Gessen quotes a column in New York magazine by Andrew Sullivan headlined “Is there still room for debate?” in which he writes “The notion that American society is systemically, foundationally racist is tantamount to a totalitarian ideology.”
This is the typical attack in which the author clutches his pearls and falls to the fainting couch crying “this (insert idea with which they disagree) will kill (insert one of the foundations of free society)!”
It scores a double by also using the adult version of the “I’m rubber and you’re glue” defense wherein “you’re a Nazi for pointing out I’m a Nazi.”
In response to Sullivan, Gessen deftly retorts, “To compare the changing of the ideological tide in the United States to totalitarian ideology is to fail to take account of the power differential. Totalitarian ideology had the power of the state behind it. Protesters in the streets of American cities and the journalists who support them are not backed by state or institutional power, but just the opposite: in every instance, they are in confrontation with it.”
But journalism, as the fourth column of our democracy, is actually standing directly between the protesters and the state they protest. This unique position affords great power, and it calls for great responsibility. That responsibility unfortunately has been largely abandoned by the “objective observer of two equal sides” default to which it has retreated under right-wing attacks wherein pointing out the truth is not objective, it is taking sides.
Gessen points this out by writing that the questions being asked by those advocating for Moral Clarity is “How does a vastly powerful institution such as the Times use its power? Does it amplify the state in its most brutal expression, as it did in publishing the Tom Cotton piece? Or does it raise up voices that have been marginalized throughout history?”
And, if trying to do both, should it try to even the scale between the huge power of the state and the near powerlessness of those opposing it?
I think the answer is clearly explained by Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
In this case, the neutrality of an organization as powerful as the New York Times will always support the state rather than those who work to change it. And no matter how hard they work to explain that their neutrality is “fairness,” amplifying the voice of a senator that argues we should use the military to quell peaceful protests in an an inaccuracy-filled opinion piece is putting their thumb on a scale already heavily weighted against those who protest brutality of the state.