https://news.yahoo.com/texas-judge-accused-calling-immigrants-084313347.html
This afternoon, while perusing the Drudge Report online, which I do once or twice a week, a particular headline caught my eye : "Texas Judge Accused of Calling Immigrants 'Wetbacks'..." That seemed so outrageous that I clicked on the link which took me to a "Yahoo! News" article written by Jose Pagliery, "a political investigations reporter at The Daily Beast."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/author/jose-pagliery
This supposed news story includes the following sentence:
“Gov. Greg Abbott, a radical Republican who keeps pulling off xenophobic political stunts that involve sending buses full of migrants to New York City and the nation’s capital, drew intense criticism last year when he launched a law enforcement blitz against illegal immigration.”
If you click on “radical Republican” in the above sentence, a link will take you to a Daily Beast hit-piece on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, entitled “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is Pushing Republicans Across the Country to the Extreme Right,” written by Wajahat Ali.
According to his website, wajali.com, "Wajahat Ali is a Daily Beast columnist."
So, we’ve got Yahoo! News presenting or linking to the work of two journalists whose columns regularly appears in the leftist Daily Beast, who are writing predictably negative articles about the Republican governor of Texas, and one of whom cites the other as a source for his article.
Journalism has changed quite drastically in my lifetime. I’ve regularly read many newspapers over the years, both in print and online. I’ve also read innumerable articles featured by news organizations such as AP, Reuters, etc. As I recall, there used to be a marked difference between fact-based news articles and opinion pieces. Nowadays, they seem increasingly smooshed together. I don’t recall and I can’t even imagine that twenty or thirty years ago, a NEWS ARTICLE would contain a sentence that began with anything even remotely like “Gov. Greg Abbott, a radical Republican who keeps pulling off xenophobic political stunts….”
I question whether it’s in the public’s best interest for news articles – as distinct from opinion pieces – to so overtly express the journalists’ personal political views about the subject of their stories. Imagine a sentence in a news article that began with “Vladimir Putin, that mass-murdering bastard, said yesterday….” Now, I think Putin is indeed a mass-murdering bastard, but that’s not a characterization that belongs in a straight news story. Even if the reporter takes out the “bastard” bit, and simply writes “Putin, accused of mass murder in Ukraine, said yesterday….,” we are presented with a judgement which may not be the subject of the story and which may not be supported by the story.
It’s all-too-easy to blur the distinction between (A) what a politician actually says or does, and (B) how a journalist who reports the story judges and evaluates that politician’s words and deeds. I hope the day will come again when reporters, as distinct from op-ed writers, will report the news and allow the readers to decide for themselves whether they’ve just read good news or bad news and whether the subject of the article is a good guy or a bad guy.