The trend was evident in 2016, when media outlets decided to focus on Hillary Clinton’s corruption, favor trading, and subsequent cover-up attempts. As any journalism professor could tell you, the purpose of reporting is to answer basic questions, like Who? What? When? Where? Why? And does this story help bolster the chances of the Democratic Party’s candidate or not?
So sayeth self-styled journalism ethicist Jay Rosen, and other theorists of the trade like Jay Jarvis. There was too much reporting going on, they argue. Democracy dies in excessive transparency, apparently. Who is at “fault” for the election of Donald Trump, they ask, as if Clinton had been predestined to wear her crown. And did journalists do enough to propel history in the proper direction?
There is plenty of data available on this question. It’s difficult to believe this now, but at one point a number of top media outlets considered the first-ever FBI investigation of a major presidential candidate in the history of the republic to be somewhat newsworthy. So they proceeded to cover the candidate’s many lies, her purging of somewhere around 30,000 pieces of evidence, and the FBI’s she’s-so-freaking-guilty-but-not-guilty verdict. And when authorities uncovered a computer that...
