Journalistic independence in a time of division

Editor’s note: This is excerpted from the 2024 Reuters Memorial Lecture delivered March 4 at Oxford University.

The bad news about the news industry has somehow gotten even worse. It’s not a good sign when two different magazines both use the phrase “Extinction-Level Event” in headlines about the outlook for news organizations.

Journalists lucky enough to still have jobs often lack support needed to do original reporting of consequence — not just money but time, guidance of experienced editors, and the ability to go to the places and talk to the people they’re writing about.

The actual work of journalism has become harder as well. Threats, harassment and attacks continue to escalate, stoked by anti-press rhetoric calling journalism “fake news” and people who report it “enemies of the people.” Near-record numbers of journalists are being killed and jailed. And increasingly aggressive efforts to strip longstanding journalistic rights are undermining independent reporting, even in countries that historically supported a free press.

As news organizations strain against these pressures, they have to compete in an information ecosystem dominated by a handful of tech giants and polluted with misinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda and clickbait — all of which are further eroding trust in media.

And now the arrival of generative artificial intelligence promises to worsen every one of the challenges facing news organizations, unless those developing this powerful technology — and the frameworks to regulate it — ensure AI is used to support a trustworthy news ecosystem, rather than to hasten its demise.

So why, when my profession faces more existential threats than you could fit in a big budget horror movie, have I decided to talk about the comparatively esoteric concept of journalistic independence?

Because this era has made journalistic independence harder than ever, rarer than ever and, I believe, more important than ever.

The world is grappling with giant challenges, from accelerating climate change to persistent inequality to technological disruption to democratic erosion to seemingly intractable global conflicts. Epidemics of misinformation and polarization are making the search for solutions more elusive. Overcoming those forces and bringing communities together to understand the options, make hard decisions, and take action requires trustworthy facts and mutual understanding. And facts and understanding are precisely what independent journalism offers society.

Yet in my role as publisher of The New York Times, I continue to be startled by the growing resistance to independent journalism.

An increasingly self-sorted and intensely polarized public is perhaps most unified in the belief that any journalist who challenges their side’s narrative must be getting the story wrong.

Let me define what I mean by journalistic independence.

Think of it as a first-order commitment to open-mindedness. Journalistic independence demands a willingness to follow the facts, even when they lead you away from what you assumed would be true. A willingness to engage at once empathetically and skeptically with a wide variety of people and perspectives. An insistence on reflecting the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. A posture of curiosity rather than conviction, of humility rather than righteousness.

Independence does not mean both-sidesism, centrism or a defense of the status quo. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card for inaccurate or unfair coverage. And it’s not an innate personal characteristic. It’s a professional discipline to which journalists must recommit each day.

This discipline is rooted in process. Things like soliciting a range of perspectives, confirmation from multiple sources, fact-checking, ethics guidelines, prohibitions on conflicts of interest. It requires diversity, in the broadest sense. Newsrooms that embrace journalists with different backgrounds and worldviews will spot more stories and imbue them with greater nuance and insight.

The discipline requires courage. You need to be willing to challenge conventional wisdom and groupthink. You need to be willing to take a simple, easy, or comfortable story and complicate it with truths people don’t want to hear.

And you need to be willing to acknowledge that we don’t always get it right. That sometimes the critics have a point. Like every news organization, the Times gets things wrong — sometimes very wrong. Our past failures on important stories like the Iraq War or the AIDS crisis give us plenty of reasons for humility. Pursuing the truth wherever it leads sometimes means recognizing our own mistakes, and correcting them fully and transparently. That, too, is independence.

Journalistic independence has long been contested by those on the right who see it as masking a pervasive liberal bias. It’s long been contested by those on the left who argue that independence privileges a straight, white, male worldview that props up existing power structures. And it’s increasingly contested by some journalists, who argue that a society with existential challenges cannot afford an impartial press focused more on sharing information than crusading for change.

The posture of journalistic independence is now contested by nearly every group we cover on nearly every issue.

Why? The social-media era encourages people to self-sort into communities by shared identity, interest or worldview. These groups form their own narratives, which harden and become extreme. These echo chambers celebrate work conforming to their narratives and protest anything that challenges them.

It’s important to restate that being open to good-faith criticism is essential. A news organization that cuts itself off from such feedback is destined to make more and bigger mistakes. When we make mistakes, we correct them promptly and openly, and then strive to learn from them in the future.

We are often told this posture of independence represents some kind of moral abdication. But when I look at forces keeping society from coming together to rise to our era’s challenges — in the Middle East, Ukraine, the U.S. or anywhere else — I see no lack of passionate, morally confident actors sounding the alarm.

I view the posture of independence as the better, more optimistic path. As independent journalists, we empower fellow citizens with the information they need to make decisions for themselves. That is a profound act of trust, of confidence.

I remain clear eyed about the ways misinformation and polarization conspire to block the shared reality society needs to come together. But I believe the answer to those scourges can be found not in an advocate’s crusading righteousness, but in a journalist’s humbler mission: to seek the truth and help people understand the world.