is a piece by Jeff Jarvis titled The News and its New Silent Majority: Clinton Supporters. Jarvis is a former journalist who now teaches the subject at City University in New York, and who also blogs — this is a blog post. Pulitzer Prize winner Connie Schultz, herself now teaching at Kent State and who is the wife of Sen. Sherrod Brown, tweeted about it which is how I discovered it.
The piece is NOT written from the perspective of a journalist, but with the experience of one who long served in that role. Instead it is written from the perspective of an admitted partisan, a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton. From that perspective he does not like what he sees about his (former?) profession. In his second paragraph he writes:
We journalists tend to separate ourselves from the public we serve. We call ourselves objective, to distinguish us from the opinionated masses and to enable us to rise above their fray. We fancy ourselves observers, not actors, in the dramas we chronicle. I’ve argued that we must end that separation and learn to empathize with the needs and goals of the communities we serve, even considering ourselves members of those communities. Thus, social journalism. But in this argument, the journalist is still the journalist.
Jarvis provides a long introduction of how he arrives at writing this piece, a section concluding thus:
As I consume the news in my role as a citizen, not media critic or journalist, I find myself constantly aggravated — not just by Fox News but also by CNN and the Associated Press, often by MSNBC and NPR, and occasionally by The New York Times and The Washington Post.
He then tells us the lessons he has learned.