What the mainstream media gets right

Fox News goes on trial on Monday over some of its anchors’ and correspondents’ suggestions that voting-machine-maker Dominion helped fix the last US presidential election for Joe Biden. The Delaware judge has already made one major ruling: “None of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.” Now Dominion needs only prove that Fox News made its allegations with “actual malice”, that is, knowing the statements were untrue or with reckless disregard to the truth.

Fox’s defenders have a ready-made retort. They say, “Well, the mainstream media is fake news. It’s full of lies.” The claim resonates: only 30 per cent of Americans and 13 per cent of Britons trust the press, reports the World Values Survey.

Nonetheless, this charge against upmarket mainstream journalism is false. Granted, all media, from the leading US newspapers to the FT, the BBC and CNN, have biases. However, there’s a big difference between us and populist media: we have stronger safeguards for factual accuracy and against party loyalty.

Nobody is “objective”. Everyone sees the world through a prism of their beliefs and experiences. Journalists have blind spots. Notably, as regional media die out, we’ve become possibly the most metropolitan profession. That shapes our choice of topics but Fox News frequently overshoots ideology into party loyalty. Think of host Sean Hannity campaigning with Donald Trump or owner Rupert Murdoch tipping off Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner about Biden’s campaign ads. Such partisanship goes way beyond, say, a liberal paper endorsing Biden.

Fox News hosts repeated claims of vote-rigging even while the network’s leading figures dismissed them in internal emails as “insane” or “mind-blowingly nuts”. After Rudy Giuliani pushed such claims in a press conference, senior Fox News executive and former Trump staffer Raj Shah texted: “He objectively looks like he was a dead person voting 2 weeks ago.” Yet when a reporter aired a partial rebuttal of Giuliani, Shah complained: “This is the kinda s*** that will kill us.”

From the materials released as part of the trial, it seems Fox News wanted to please a Trumpist audience, so its metropolitan elites fed non-elite viewers fairy tales. At least we MSMers believe our own output.

Britain’s Fox News equivalents are rightwing newspapers that display fact-free fealty to Brexit. Journalists at one told me their bosses decided to back Brexit only just before the referendum, because “that’s where the readers were”. After Leave won, the same paper supported a rock-hard Brexit. It rarely published inconvenient facts, such as Britain’s falling exports to the EU. The BBC has its own Brexit bias: afraid of saying anything that might upset Conservatives and threaten its funding, the broadcaster sins by omission.

Of course, liberal journalists are biased against Brexit and Trump. But we cannot deny facts. Had Brexit boosted exports through trade deals, we would have acknowledged that. By contrast, when Fox News’s own fact-checkers, the “Brain Room”, cleared Dominion, they were allegedly ignored.

The MSM makes factual errors. We probably make more mistakes than academics, though fewer than commenters, whose fact-checking apparatus is often their gut. But when I read emails and comments accusing us of deliberate deception, I see that most non-journalists know as little about how journalism works as I do about dentistry. They don’t realise how seriously our employers take factual errors, let alone lies. When I misdated Pierre Mendès France’s political career last month, and the mistake slipped past our fact-checkers, the FT published a correction. I was professionally humiliated. Screw up too often, and you’re out.

Another popular misconception is that newspapers tailor editorial lines to suit advertisers. For instance, some readers recently expressed amazement that I had been “allowed” to attack SUVs. In fact, in my 28 years at the FT, the only person who ever suggested I go easy on an advertiser was a banker whose employer advertised in the paper. I felt empowered to ignore him.

Generally, advertising matters less to newspapers since ad spending migrated online. In 2020, for the first time on record, US newspapers’ revenues from circulation exceeded advertising, reports Pew Research. Ads increased only in cable television, Fox’s domain.

A third misconception is that our bosses give us political lines to follow. Well, they never told me. Nor, I gather, do colleagues at comparable publications receive ideological orders. Reading through Fox News’s emails, I thought: these people aren’t in our industry.

Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com

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