On Media Trust and Bad-Faith Criticism, Part II
The other day I pointed out how some on the partisan right attacked a CNN story as “biased” when it likely wasn’t. Reason.com tried to do something similar, though in a more gentle manner, this week, and Reason’s actions also deserve scrutiny.
Just because author Eric Boehm dressed his arguments up in a more-reasonable manner than Drew Holden and Twitchy did with CNN, it doesn’t mean he was simply engaging in thoughtful criticism without partisan motivations.
To recap: The Washington Post had published a profile of now vice president Kamala Harris in July 2019 that opened with Harris making a joke to her sister, Maya, that was arguably in bad taste. As part of a series of updates of profiles of Harris and president Joe Biden, the joke was scrapped and replaced with an intro that was more favorable to Harris. A second byline was added, as well, and Boehm claims the reporter added had recently written several “fawning” profiles of Harris.
Boehm further notes that the changes were listed under the same URL. He used this to suggest that even if the WaPo wasn’t intentionally trying to paint Harris in a more favorable light now that she’s the VPOTUS, it could certainly be perceived that way, and the Post needs to be more careful about avoiding partisan perception.
At first glance, the Reason piece seems, well, reasonable. Boehm is right that even if the Post had well-intentioned and unbiased motivations for the change — say, the new version simply read better or provided more info, in the judgment of an editor — the quiet change could lead someone to believe that the Post was trying to put Harris in a better light, now that she has been elected vice president.
Except Boehm seems to either ignore or not know something that just about anyone who works in digital media knows. Generally speaking, if you update a story and change the URL, you kill your search rankings in Google. You might even “break” the post, leading to an error message.
I say “generally speaking” because I am not sure if the Post’s content management system works that way, but it is fairly common in digital publishing.
The Post did, of course, note that the story was updated. It wasn’t hiding that the piece was changed.
Finally, who cares if the Post updated the story at this point? I don’t know how many people would notice the change, or how many cared about a profile from summer 2019, even if the Post was promoting older profiles in conjunction with the inauguration of a new administration. Also, it appears the change was made after the election was decided. A more favorable open wouldn’t be swaying votes.
Is it possible the Post put in a more favorable open to curry favor with a new administration? Yes, of course. Is it possible the Harris camp asked the Post to change it and it obliged? Again, yes, possible.
Neither seems likely, though. The Post doesn’t seem to stand to gain much by changing a few paragraphs in the Lifestyle section of the paper — not when plenty of its news reporting will likely be unfavorable to the new administration and when the opinion section will almost certainly be critical when appropriate. Softening a Lifestyle lede could in theory make Josh Dawsey’s job easier, but maybe not. It’s also ethically dubious, and the Post, like most major outlets, appears to pride itself on ethics. And from the outside, it appears to actually adhere to the standards it sets for itself.
It’s also generally a journalistic no-no to change a profile just because the subjects asked — unless there’s a good reason. Nah, it looks to me, from the outside, as if the Post simply decided the new version read better, for whatever reason.
It’s worth noting that the new version, while omitting the joke that some might think is in poor taste, especially given Kamala Harris’ record as a prosecutor, isn’t particularly fawning and does touch on criticisms of Harris’ record.
I suppose to the outsider, it looks weird that the Post would update without including the original version, but again, the ways of search engine optimization may have been at play here.
Boehm tries to soften his criticism by acknowledging the Post could’ve been well-intentioned in making the change, but there’s still a subtext of “the Post changed this to make Harris look better” at play. It’s a wink-and-nod way of calling “bias.” Boehm isn’t wrong about perception — and the Post could’ve been more transparent or made sure to keep the old post up from the get-go, although it likely didn’t foresee that what it thought of as a mundane update would be pulled as a possible example of bias.
It’s another example of how partisan critics on the right have been putting out half-baked media critiques in a possible bid to discredit mainstream outlets, though to be fair to Boehm, he may actually be acting in good faith, just off-base, unlike our Twitchy pals.
There’s no reason left partisans can’t do this, either, but I am more aware of it coming from the right. It’s one of several factors that help drive distrust in mainstream reporting, and until this half-baked and at times bad-faith critiques stop, a certain segment of the public will never trust the mainstream media, no matter how much they should.
