It was a sad day for journalists when one of the world’s most iconic newspaper brands, The Washington Post (WaPo), announced on 5 February that it would be sacking a third of its staff. It would be closing down its sports and books sections, and downsizing its international and local news coverage.
But it was a sadder day when journalists expressed outrage, believing themselves to be immune from economic pressures. Unlike workers in other sectors, journalists believe that they are doing something nobler and more saintly. The headlines say it all. The Guardian quoted a former WaPo executive editor as saying that it was a “bloodbath”. So did “The Independent”. The Atlantic went one step further, and called it “The Murder of The Washington Post”.
Gerry Shih, a former New Delhi Bureau Chief and till recently the Jerusalem bureau head of WaPo, was more sober in his comment. In a post on X, he said: “It was a privilege to be a Post correspondent, roaming the world the last 7+ years for a paper I very much believed in. I’m gone along with the rest of the ME (Middle East) team and majority of team-mates from Delhi to Beijing to Kyiv and Latam. Sad day, but it was a lot of fun and we raised hell.”
While in Delhi, he was mostly raising “hell” against the Modi government and the Hindu right wing, which suggested what his political inclinations were. He was a good journalist, but not necessarily one without blinkers. Not surprisingly, sections of the Right-wing social media ecosystem celebrated the WaPo “bloodbath”.
One-sidedness was what WaPo Executive Editor Matt Murray hinted at while announcing the retrenchments. “Today’s news is painful. These are difficult actions…If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition, adding, “Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience.” He was, of course, talking about biases in the American context, not India.
The last line is worth noting, for journalists often think they are driven by the “truth”, and fail to acknowledge that their news and views often reflect their own political and social biases. So, one need not worry about WaPo’s liberal-left biases if it was sufficiently humble about its own shortcomings. What one should worry about is the declining faith in mass media. A Gallup poll in October last year noted that Americans’ trust in newspapers, TV and radio was down to 28 percent, even lower than the 31 percent in 2024, and 40 percent five years ago. A Pew report said much the same.
The broad point I would like to emphasise is that journalism is an over-rated calling, and the damage biased journalism can do is vastly under-rated.
Journalists who hark back to the good old days, when they were able to do “real journalism” of the kind that brought down governments (the Watergate scandal, for example), forget that for every scandal journalists exposed, there were probably a dozen others they were ignorant about or complicit. Which business journal talked about Enron and its financial legerdemain, or any of the other financial scandals that led to the 2008 global meltdown? Most business crooks and politicians tend to be on magazine covers as heroes till something else upsets their standing.
Worse, the media often is in league with the government in the name of national security or interest.
Does anyone remember the role played by the media in backing George Bush’s war against Iraq in the name of WMD (weapons of mass destruction)? Or their support for the illegal bombings of Belgrade by Bill Clinton in 1999? If you are not convinced, you could read Ashley Rindsberg’s The Gray Lady Winked: How The New York Times’ Misreporting and Fabrications Radically Alter History. In the run-up to the 2020 US presidential elections, the NYT went out of its way to support Joe Biden and cast doubts on a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop (with potentially incriminating evidence) broken by The New York Post.
In our own case, even while some opposition politicians and allied media talk about “godi media” (a reference to media slanting the news in favour of the Modi government), they refuse to acknowledge their own biases. In 2014-15, there were some incidents involving churches, and the media immediately framed the story as an attack on Christians. But a little more checking would have told them that such incidents happened even more with temples and gurudwaras. A tendency to assume the worst about a political dispensation you disagree with is compounded by a lack of numeracy among journalists. Six incidents in Delhi’s churches do not amount to a general attack on Christians (or minorities in general) in a country of 1.4 billion people.
Both WaPo and NYT have also indulged in their own negative narrative-building of a communal India. Ramesh Rao, a US-based Indian media academic, has repeatedly pointed out the NYT’s anti-Hindu biases.
This is not about creating another victimhood narrative about negative western media depictions of India and its majority community, but to underline a simple fact: journalism is never without its biases, for no human being is without bias. If you are a woman, you may be more critical of men; if you are a forward caste person, you may be less aware of the angst among those left behind (and vice-versa); if you are a Hindu or Muslim journo, you may be inclined to be more sympathetic to one side or the other. One side will want to highlight mob lynchings, the other side Love Jihad cases.
The hubris lies in pretending that journalists are somehow seekers of the whole truth. This hubris was punctured when social media started calling out mistakes and biases in mainstream media, and a wounded fraternity with fragile egos started calling everyone on social media a “troll” if they did not agree with their views.
Hubris runs even higher in the US media, where they have editorial boards seeking to give a collective opinion on issues and presidential candidates. In 2024, when WaPo owner Jeff Bezos told the newspaper’s editorial board that they cannot endorse any presidential candidate, but could write what they believe in under their own names, all hell broke loose. The board wanted to endorse Kamala Harris, but Bezos said no, triggering a wave of cancellations among subscribers. The question is not whether editors should favour one candidate or another: it is the underlying belief that their opinion is somehow more weighty than that of anyone else.
The problem with journalism begins with journalism schools, where we have been told that dog-bites-man is not a story, but man-bites-dog can be. Would-be journos are also told that there is no story unless you have an interesting “angle”, and with the rise of the internet as a publication medium, this has gone one step further with click-bait headlines being used to grab eyeballs.
While this obviously makes mainstream journalists think they are somehow nobler than those click-bait authors and podcasters, their real angst is about the loss of the power to play middleman between the creators of news and the consumers.
For more than two decades now, journalism has been “disintermediated” by the internet age. This means anyone with the ability to report with his own mobile phone camera, do her own podcasts or video channels on YouTube, or write a coherent opinion piece, can gain an audience. This is what bothers journalists most, for they are no longer able to gate-keep what gets churned out as news or views.
Journalism today is no longer a vanity project of pompous journalists. They would do themselves and their audiences a favour by getting off their high horses and cultivate some humility.
At the end of the day, journalism is not necessarily a higher calling than any other, including commercial sex work. While the latter has been targeted by morality crusaders since time immemorial, there is at least some honesty in what is sought and given in this transaction. With journalism one can’t say for sure what is on offer, and what the reader or viewer really wants. Truth is often not what the journalist offers. Now everybody knows that.
The WaPo “bloodbath” is as good a time as any for journalists to introspect and ask themselves why the world thinks so poorly of them. They need to be more honest about their own biases, and stop thinking of themselves as god’s gift to the world.
R Jagannathan is an editor and the former editorial director at Swarajya magazine. He tweets @TheJaggi. Views are personal.
This article was originally published on his personal blog.