Walter Hussman's views should end the debate over objectivity
The UNC journalism school's biggest donor wants the school to be a champion of objectivity. The history of those principles are fraught with maintaining white supremacy and power.
In between airing the Trump rally live and skewering Elizabeth Warren for her support of universal healthcare, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson thought he’d engage in a debate over journalistic objectivity.
It is rich, to say the least, that one of America’s top race-baiting provocateurs with masterful control over abusing facts and history to support a partisan and ideological narrative wanted to lean in on any debate about journalistic responsibility.
Carlson is hardly the first to shroud himself in the language of ideals to pursue nakedly ideological goals. The U.S. has a long history of the most rabid of partisans engaging in the debate over journalistic objectivity, a history I’d bet Carlson knows well.
Carlson’s guest in October 2019 to advance the theory that trust in media could be regained if only they would adhere better to age old principles of objectivity was someone who North Carolinians in particular are learning a lot more about in recent days: Arkansas newspaper publisher Walter Hussman.
Hussman gained national notoriety over the weekend after North Carolina’s scrappy longform startup The Assembly got ahold of emails showing he pushed UNC administrators not to offer tenure to the New York Times’ Nikole Hannah Jones, a Pulitzer winner, MacArthur “genius” and author of the 1619 project. Hussman is the school’s biggest benefactor, granting it a $25 million endowment, with which the school was rebranded with his name and an entryway display showing his personal core principles of objectivity.
“My hope and vision was that the journalism school would be the champion of objective, impartial reporting and separating news and opinion, and that would add so much to its reputation and would benefit both the school and the University,” he wrote in one of the emails. “Instead, I fear this possible and needless controversy will overshadow it.”
(Disclosure: I’ve also been working on a story recently for The Assembly).
Here’s the key exchange from the Carlson segment, admittedly the most tepid of the night compared to the talk of socialism and lefty crazies (emphasis mine):
WALTER HUSSMAN, NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER: Well, I think there's the perception that there's too much bias in the media and there's not enough separation between news and opinion, and I see it myself.
About two years ago, I heard some journalists saying things like, don't believe in the false equivalency of giving both sides. Well, I mean, that's what I learned in journalism, you're always supposed to get both sides.
CARLSON: Right.
HUSSMAN: And statements like you know, I'm here to figure out what the truth is and then share that with you and that's not what we understand our role is, our role is not to find the truth, our role is to gather all the facts, verifiable facts we can, give those to the readers, let them determine what the truth is.
CARLSON: That is, I mean, you just described what I think was universal orthodoxy, just 30 years ago, and you've been running papers for an awfully long time. No one questioned what you just said. But now what you just said is a minority view, what changed do you think?
HUSSMAN: I'm not sure how it changed. I think it changed slowly over time. But we are trying to take the step to move it back in the right direction again.
On their face, Hussman’s key statements aren’t controversial. But the way in which they’ve been weaponized to combat reporting he and others simply disagree with is wholly dishonest and reflects that the fight over objectivity has long been a war over politics and power veiled in one about journalism.
Hussman’s original “no comment” on The Assembly’s story is only the beginning of the irony in Hussman claiming to hold himself to higher ideals than other working journalists, including Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Incredibly, Hussman later told the News & Observer that even though he believes Hannah-Jones shouldn’t get tenure, his views also should not necessarily win the day. “I don’t think donors should have a say in who gets hired or who gets terminated in the faculty,” Hussman said. “And I don’t think any university worth its salt should allow that.”
He was far more strident in emails to university leadership. Hussman echoed much of the modern history over ideological objectivity when he said that there were white southerners, too, who helped fight for civil rights. It was Hussman’s way of dismissing the 1619 project that put enslaved Americans and their descendants at the center of our country’s narrative.
In fact, the idea of painting the media as “liberal” hacks is very much steeped in the fight for civil rights in the Jim Crow South through this day.
George Wallace was one of the first to blame the messenger merely for showing the images of white police and others beating civil rights protesters. By the time Richard Nixon took the presidency, the idea of smearing a liberal, crusading press who ever dared to expose the abuses of those who opposed civil rights or Republican orthodoxy had “become conservative dogma,” according to one academic paper on the subject. It’s a straight line from there to Trump, who called the press the “enemy of the people.”
As journalists tear each other apart over wars about objectivity, like the one that played out last month at the Associated Press, the right is forcefully pushing propaganda and disinformation to suit its agenda. Anything that helps is courageous and freedom-loving. Anything that gets in the way — of, for example, a bipartisan commission to get to the truth of what happened during the January 6 insurrection or merely pointing out that there has been no evidence of rigged elections — is fake news.
The media is hardly sacrosanct. Reporters and publications make mistakes and overstep — and it has hurt their legitimacy that they often fail to reckon with these missteps openly and transparently, let alone a past that often openly supported white supremacy. Most recently, many in the mainstream press were eager to push back against Trump’s claim that COVID may have originated in a Chinese lab — it turns out that may be true. There have been parts of the Trump-Russia saga that have been shown to be overstated, with those outside of mainstream institutions doing the heavy lifting to correct the record.
Along with Republicans’ insistence on weaponizing the idea of fake news when inconvenient narratives arise, it is media’s failure to acknowledge or grapple with inconsistencies that come from working in a hard profession where truth is often elusive that drives distrust — not the inability to adhere to some mythical idea of objectivity.
So why do we continue to fall into the trap of believing that objectivity is journalism’s crucible?
Simply put, it’s because it’s a more digestible conversation than the one it veils: grappling with the legacy of generational power and white supremacy. It is painfully true that many of the same newspapers who ascribe to objective principles have propped up big business, powerful politicians and failed to be a community and political watchdog. Journalism has often failed to wrestle with its complex, contradictory past in this regard.
It seems especially appropriate in the Hussman context to remember how Joseph Pulitzer — whose newspapers spent as much time making stories that would sell up as it did investing in investigative reporting — rebranded his legacy with a large donation to the Columbia Journalism School, which then named the profession’s most prestigious prize after him.
Hussman perhaps fashions himself as similarly shrewd. He was willing to try to throw his weight around as a donor to influence the decisions of others, push his editorial page to warn about the dangers of Joe Biden and use his influence to get on Carlson’s show to push other journalists in the same direction.
More than that, according to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Douglas Blackmon, Hussman as publisher has pushed the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette away from its civil rights-crusading roots.
I get the sense that because Hussman did this through back room deal-making, influence peddling and newspaper and broadcast opinion pages, he feels he didn’t break his sacrosanct rules.
Instead, let’s call this debate over objectivity what it is: whether journalism’s role is to challenge the powerful and seek to change the status quo — or be beholden to them.
Objectivity vs. Fairness
In The View From Somewhere, Lewis Raven Wallace contrasts journalist Gary Younge’s hostile interview with white supremacist Richard Spencer and his work to understand Trump voters.
This was a rare decision on Younge’s part to provide coverage of a white supremacist seeking coverage for his ideas, which he felt could only be accompanied by tough questioning and immediate, on-camera challenges to Spencer’s Lost Cause lies. And Younge is careful to distinguish between his interviews with neo-Nazi activists, and those with white Americans who benefit from whiteness and hold racist views, but don’t necessarily seek a platform for those views. Younge didn’t want to write takedowns of these Americans — he wanted to understand how their beliefs came to be, to put their beliefs in context.
“I think journalists should be curious, even with people you don’t like,” he said. “It’s less inquisitorial and more kind of exploratory method. I actually want to know why people vote for Donald Trump. I don’t want to tell them not to vote for Donald Trump … My job is to find out what the hell is going on.”
It is all of our jobs to find out what the hell is going on — and tell stories with as much clarity and fairness that we can muster, respecting other views along the way and gathering evidence to present the best version of the truth, whether it conforms with our personal views or not. Put simply, journalists should be judged by the work they produce, not some blind adherence to someone else’s views on what their values should be.
The work of a journalist is as essential and messy as Hannah-Jones wrote in her Pulitzer-winning essay for the 1619 project as living in a nation “founded on an ideal and a lie.”
People forget that Hannah-Jones message in the opening essay of the project was one of hope. She ends by asking a question and giving an answer: “What if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we have never been the problem but the solution?”
She seeks common ground by pointing to Black Americans’ legacy as founders — not authors of the legal documents that made America a country, but the flesh and bone that made it a reality. “We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all,” she wrote.
I understand why Walter Hussman is threatened by that notion, but I don’t think it has anything to do with objectivity. It is clear that the 1619 Project — which I’d encourage him and anyone else to actually read — was not arrived at lightly. The project is a remarkable, open exploration of both American history and political understanding that doesn’t shoehorn facts to fit a preconceived narrative, but seeks to wrestle with them through the lens that equal rights for all Americans are attainable if we reckon with America’s pockmarked, glorious, terrible, wonderful history.
Hannah-Jones’ work shook to the core power centers of this country that have built generational power by relying on the myth of white supremacy. I think that’s at least part of the reason why the journalism school’s faculty knew she was deserving of tenure before the political bosses above them reversed the decision.
UNC’s Board of Trustees is going to again consider Hannah-Jones’ tenure application. They should also reconsider any promises make to Hussman.
I hope that before UNC etches in stone Hussman’s core objectivity principles, as he has asked for, they do the work of a good journalist: Examine his body of work, understand those around him and grapple with his complex history and why he made such a request.
And I hope they ask one last question before making a decision, one all good journalists should ask when writing a story: Who, exactly, benefits from this decision?
Enraging and/or inspiring
No doubt, editors at that time thought these were objective headlines, too.
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