Good night and good luck
The Moran case and the vexed question of impartiality
On March 9 1954 the legendary American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow closed his See It Now current affairs programme on CBS TV with - as usual - a statement. The show - watched by up to six million viewers - had looked at the activities of the US senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy and his four years of ever-expanding inquiries into communist infiltration into government, army and other institutions.
Murrow was already a celebrated radio reporter, most famously from London during the Blitz, reporting on a war that the US had not joined and that many Americans - most vocally those who had joined the America First movement - wanted no part of. Returning home in the weeek before Pearl Harbor Murrow was the guest of honour at a dinner in which the principal speaker told him that he had "laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead, were mankind's dead. You have destroyed the superstition that is done beyond 3000 miles of water is not really done at all.”
12 years later Murrow was taking on McCarthy. While congressional scrutiny was a good thing, he argued:
...the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism.
Murrow ended with a peroration.
We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result... we cannot defend freedom by deserting it in the name of saving it.
Murrow's bosses at CBS were alarmed at what he had done, worrying that the station would no longer be seen as politically neutral. Meanwhile that section of the press which supported McCarthy professed itself outraged. The Hearst columnist Jack O'Brian took particular aim at Murrow's colleague, Don Hollenbeck, and renamed him "Stalinbeck", sponsors of the programme pulled their ads and McCarthy himself accused CBS of being soft on communism. Today it might be hard to find a working journalist on what is called the "mainstream media" who wouldn't think that Murrow's statement was an admirable example of that horrible cliche "speaking truth to power". Perhaps one of the greatest.
Murrow to Moran
Last Sunday ABC News suspended - "pending evaluation"- its senior national correspondent, Terry Moran, after he had published (and deleted) an extended X post in which he described Donald Trump and his Cassius-looking policy chief Stephen Miller as "world class haters". Of Miller Moran wrote, "You can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment", whereas with Trump, "his hatred [is] only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification.”
ABC News's statement stated that it “stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others. The [Moran] post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards.”
The White House made hay. Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt argued that the "unhinged" post "speaks to the distrust that the American public have in the legacy media". Miller himself said that Moran had "pulled off his mask... For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose." J.D. Vance got in on the act calling Moran's post a "vile smear", "dripping with hatred" and told supporters to“remember that every time you watch ABC’s coverage of the Trump administration.”
Moran isn't a legend like Murrow - he belongs to our less than heroic age. But when he was named ABC's Chief Foreign Correspondent his boss praised him as being as "equally adept interviewing a confessed hit man in one of Mexico's most notorious gangs as he is breaking down some of the most complex Supreme Court decisions...Terry has the ability to see the story no one else sees, explain its importance to the audience, and do it all in a stylish and compelling way." Ie he's a good journalist.
I make the comparison here because it isn't obvious that Moran's "breach" of editorial standards of objectivity and impartiality was any more egregious than were Murrow's 70 years earlier. In fact you could argue that since his words weren't uttered during an ABC broadcast they were less problematic.
What is objectivity?
In some ways ABC's scruples seem quaint in the age of Joe Rogan, GBNews and Truth Social. In the last week one of the main presenters on NewsUK's rump Talk TV since 2022, David Bull, has become the chairman of the Reform UK party, where he was co deputy leader until 2023. Reform's leader, Nigel Farage, still hosts his own show on GBNews, a role he took up in 2021. A quick survey of the presenters, story selection and media profile of these outlets shows no pretence at objectivity or impartiality. Quite the reverse - it seems likely that their audiences choose them precisely because of their partisan character. A debate on such stations will consist of deciding whether you throw your support behind Farage or his estranged former colleague "mass deportations" Rupert Lowe. And ending up with Farage.