Anchors Away

Journalism and stability in the digital age

If legacy media had stuck to their traditions of neutrality and fairness, it is probable that Donald Trump would never have been president. His candidacy seemed unimaginable. He had no experience as an elected official, and in 2016 he was up against a sure thing, a woman with extensive experience in government who had the blessing of the popular outgoing executive.

It seemed obvious that Hilary Clinton’s record as Secretary of State and her roots in the Democratic Party, including two terms as First Lady, would assure her victory. The media treated Clinton carefully and glossed over her weaknesses. But her ugly, negative campaign style was beyond their control,

She was ahead in the polls, right up to the eve of the election. “Don’t get complacent” about Trump, she warned supporters in New York City on Sept. 9, 2016. “Don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think[,] well he’s done [i.e., finished] this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?”

To laughter and applause, she continued, “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people [and] now how [sic; have] 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America” (quoted by Reilly).

Irredeemable deplorables might not read The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but they got the message. Six weeks later, the incredible happened. Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, but she lost the election. Trump ended up with 306 electoral votes, Clinton with 232.

The media believed that a Trump victory was impossible. In a classic failure of objectivity, they used their polls to confirm their expectations, not to test them. The day before the election, NBC gave Clinton a six-point lead, a number unchanged from the week before. No wonder Trump’s victory was a shock.

Many have speculated that Trump supporters resented Clinton’s sneering contempt and, when polled, said they were undecided (see NBC, below, on the polls). If Trump supporters were hiding in the weeds, the media had only themselves to thank. Trump’s followers waited. On election night, they gave him Florida, and then Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. It was over. Watching television anchors explain this to viewers makes for an entertaining stretch of You-Tube time.

Trump surprised the media again with his comeback in 2024. Several polls showed Kamala Harris gaining support the day before the election (see The Economist, below). But he defeated her in the seven swing states—by six points in Arizona and by three in Nevada and North Carolina. All major demographic categories (white working class; Black; college-educated white, Hispanic) increased the share of Republican votes in 2024 compared to 2020.

In 2024 the media never pretended to be neutral. They protected Harris and her boss. Playing along with White House PR, they covered up Joe Biden’s senility and his prostate cancer.

Now, Kenneth L. Khachigian points out, they are busy covering up their cover up. As a distraction, the media are pumping up Trump’s fight with Harvard and pursuing fake claims about the death of Medicaid. They are looking for anything that will take the focus off their connivance with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who, as Khachigian write, “spewed lies repeatedly affirming Mr. Biden’s good health.”

The media missed the upsets of 2016 and 2024 because they failed to be objective. The Oxford English Dictionary defines objectivity as “the ability to consider or represent facts, information, etc., without being influenced by personal feelings or opinions; impartiality; detachment,” which is to say to consider facts fairly, without discrimination or hidden motives.

Major figures in the media see themselves on the front lines of ideological warfare, battling the Trump forces of evil and using the Democrats’ talking points to boost the good guys. For them, objectivity is not a virtue. For them, is it even possible?

Andrey Mir argues that the media have learned that objectivity can be dangerous. He has suggested that in 2016 the media might have done a disservice to Clinton by treating her as a serious candidate while they treated Trump as “infotainment” (p. 104). Both choices were prejudicial, but objectivity was harder on Clinton, who had a history in government. She had liabilities that Trump did not have; her deceptions and missteps were the actions of America’s Secretary of State.

One of Clinton’s mistakes was the use of her personal, unsecure server for top-secret government communications. Early in 2016, FBI director James Comey (below) dismissed charges against Clinton for this violation of basic protocol. She got a free pass.

But then, shortly before the election, he changed his mind. Assuming that she would win, Comey wanted to appear tough and independent. He re-opened the investigation, dismissing a subordinate’s concern that by doing so he would be increasing Trump’s chances of becoming president. His decision was made in self-interest, not in Clinton’s interest. Many commentators believe that his reversal, coming when it did, greatly damaged her standing by resurfacing aproblem her campaign had done its best to bury. Comey turned her history of service, which was her single asset, into a liability.

The government stepped on the election scale again in 2023, when Jack Smith, a special counsel in the Department of Justice, launched an investigation into Trump’s handing of classified documents, an echo of the charges made against Clinton. In June 2023, Trump was indicted in Miami, the first time a former U.S. president had faced federal charges—37 of them. Trump pleaded not guilty. The media was awash with predictions about the devastating effect that Smith’s move would for Trump’s candidacy.

CNN applauded Smith’s attempt to “bring Trump to Justice.” But others in the media, remembering FBI interference in 2016, realized that this unprecedented assault could help Trump. A man familiar with lawfare, Trump successfully portrayed himself as a victim of Smith’s scheming. In November 2024, when Trump was re-elected, Smith was forced to drop all charges. Once again, a government agency’s attempt to interfere in an election had backfired.

After Clinton lost, The New York Times acknowledged that it had tunnel vision and set out to understand “other Americans,” meaning, I suppose, those who did not read the Times. However, the paper’s chief readers, white, educated progressives, objected to this attempt at fairness and even-handedness. They regard “bothsidesism” as a defect and want the paper to reflect their views (Mir, p. 105).

Voters today can see that the media is partisan. Gallup News reports that “partisans have different levels of confidence in the media.” In late 2024, “54% of Democrats, 27% of independents and 12% of Republicans” said that they had “a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media.”

Trust in the media means believing that media present the news in balanced and impartial ways that help readers understand issues and draw their own conclusions. Incredibly, barely half of Democrats polled believe what they see and hear, even though media takes their party’s line. Just a quarter of independent voters confidence in the media, and about one Republican in ten does.

Mir relates the “death of journalistic objectivity” to the “death of journalism” (p. 99). He blames capitalism, i.e., the profit motive, for the decline in objectivity. In so doing offers a useful historical perspective on journalism, profit, and objectivity.

Newspapers now run editorials in their headlines. Recently The Chicago Tribune declared, “Trump confronts South African leader with baseless claims of the systematic killing of white farmers” (Imry and Aiamer). What was wrong with “questionable claims”? One thing: profit. The Tribune needs to put its partisan leanings up front to keep its true-blue Chicago audience buying papers.

Objectivity is also an issue at the big networks. Trump has launched a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News. He charges that a Fall 2024 CBS News interview with Kamala Harris was edited to make her look and sound better than she was. In all fairness, it would be difficult to imagine a Harris interview that did not require some touch-up to improve the impression she made.

CBS News Chief Executive Wendy McMahon wanted to fight Trump’s claim. Her boss, Paramount Global co-CEO, Shari Redstone, disagreed (CBS is owned by Paramount Global). Redstone wanted the Trump suit settled and out of the way so she could merge Paramont Global with Skydance Media (Flint). McMahon then left CBS, saying that she and the company no longer agreed “on the path forward.”

Redstone sees matters differently. She has become a vocal critic of the anti-Trump path and of CBS News itself, which she sees as lacking objectivity. She has criticized CBS’s coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas, claiming that “some stories have had an anti-Israel bias.”

Redstone also made news when she backed CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil, co-host of CBS Mornings, who challenged the woke anti-Semitism of Black leader Ta-Nehisi Coates when Coates was interviewed in October 2024, after he had said he wished he could have participated in the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel that killed over 1,200 people. Dokoupil’s interview was widely criticized by progressives, who worship Coates and endorse his murderous anti-Semitism. Redstone, however, praised the interview as a model of “civil discourse” (a quality never much valued by the woke; see Gold et al. below).

Credit Redstone with maturity and good sense. But let’s not forget that, as co-CEO of a major corporation, she has bottom lines to think about. As Mir says, objectivity and capitalism go hand in hand. Like newspapers editors a century ago, Redstone understands that evenhandedness is good for business.

The big networks are also struggling to keep a foothold in the era of digital journalism. All legacy news sources have diversified their approach. They now have their own websites, apps, and channels. They have discarded their previous function as neutral new sources. Unlike Redstone’s model, their model sees partiality and partisanship as good for circulation. They have become more like social media.

We can see that, in the digital world, we no longer deal in binaries and “bothsidesism.” There are numerous “truths” in circulation. Reporters are not anchors but digital roamers in search of followers. As Mir notes, they frame the news in terms of their personal reaction to it. They have large followings and assume that their audience comprises people who are just like them. For its part, the audience secures this bond by “liking” the reporter’s work. That’s why so many reporters speak as if their subject had only one side, i.e., theirs. They are part of a feedback loop that isolates them from views that contradict their own.

The identification of audiences with reporters seems to be as personal as anything can be in the digital world. But it is also commercial. Behind it is the reporter’s self-interested sales pitch. Reporters function as social media influencers. Competing for eyes and for likes, they want to draw a specific audience and use that audience to build their reputation, which they can then monetize. They design and present content—they shape the news—to appeal to that audience. The target audience is that part of the population we can call “woke,” liberal Democrats who value partisanship far more than they value patriotism or loyalty to traditional political parties, say nothing of loyalty to the United States.

When journalism was anchored by objectivity, it aimed for fairness and even-handedness. “Anchor” is an Old English word, with origins in Latin anchora, meaning “hook.” The anchor was a source of a ship’s stability, a mainstay. We find it in Beowulf’s description of “a roomy ship, firmly anchored” (sidfæþmedscip, / on ancre fæst, ll. 302-3). Television’s news anchormen served the same purposes, both hook (a warm personality viewers are be drawn to) and source of stability (well-informed, reliable).

When it was anchored in this sense, television was also anchored by masculinity. Dan Rather anchored the news at CBS from 1981 to 2006, 24 years. At NBC Tom Brokaw was anchor from 1982 to 2004. At ABC Peter Jennings was the anchor from 1983 to 2006. They were the people in charge, the people who could explain events to everybody else. The length of their tenures it itself a mark of the news anchor’s staying power.

The anchor’s purpose is to sort the world’s chaos into manageable segments that are neatly divided by commercials, still introduced with the comforting phrase “after these messages.” Viewers get the feeling that things are not, after all, spinning out of control. No matter how bad the news might be, normal life (i.e., commerce) will continue.

Writing in 2015, Frank Rich outlined the role of the anchorman, which was to present the news with a delicate balance of entertainment and information. Rich calls the news anchor an “inane institution” whose survival is difficult to comprehend. Yet the role persists, albeit without the “man” attached. Influential anchors include Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, Christiane Amanpour, Liz Cho, and many others in recent decades.

“As an omnipotent national authority figure,” Rich writes, the network-news anchor is now “a hollow anachronism.” Today “it doesn’t actually matter who puts on the bespoke suit and reads the news from behind a desk.” This, I would argue, would be the case only if the news were delivered with “impartiality” and “detachment,” which it no longer is.

Social media have now circumvented the anchor. The news ship blows with the wind. News in myriad forms goes straight to the audience, day and night. It comes from roving reporters or stringers who are usually on the scene of whatever news they describe—an accident, say, or a Senate hearing, a background that establishes the reporter’s authenticity. There seems to be nothing between the reporter and the event. Like the anchorman of Walter Cronkite’s era, the reporter is a filter, not a window.

Part of the anchorman’s power was his trustworthiness, which rested on his neutrality and his objectivity. But more than 50 years ago, that model began to show its limits. When Cronkite announced the death of John F. Kennedy on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, his shock and distress were obvious. His display of spontaneous feeling might be seen as the origin of today’s pageants of emotive and self-absorbed reporting. After Cronkite, the anchor continued to stand before the news, but now he was an observer with views, a person who had opinions and feelings that mattered.

A greater change occurred when Cronkite went to Vietnam in 1968 and returned to report that the war was a stalemate. “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate,” he told his audience, “not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” This was political commentary, delivered to the television audience by a news anchor. Many believed it helped bring about the U.S. withdrawal from the war.

In 2004, Rather showed the risks of the new partisanship. He was involved in what is now known as “the Killian documents controversy.” This scandal involved documents criticizing George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. On CBS’s 60 Minutes, Rather presented the documents as authentic. He was backed up by his producer. But the papers’ authenticity was challenged, and his reputation never recovered. In fact, the controversy soon amounted to an attack on the role of the news anchor and on all of CBS News.

But Rather’s partisanship, like Cronkite’s, seems to have had an effect. If you look at Bush’s approval ratings at just the time of Rather’s use of the Killian documents, you will see that Gallup data show President’s disapproval ratings rising (American Presidency Project).

Also in 2004, a controversy broke out at the BBC when reporter Barbara Plett dramatized her own emotionalism before the funeral of Yassar Arafat in October of that year. Listeners objected to account of her weeping and her grief, but BBC officials declared that Plett had not violated rules of impartiality. However, the BBC Board of Governors later decided that some elements of her report did indeed violate those rules (Conlon).

Digital journalism has made the public much more sensitive to behavior like that of Plett, Cronkite, and Rather. On camera and online, digital journalists are in search of young, urban, educated, and white audiences just like the journalists themselves.

Journalism used to sell soap and cigarettes. Digital journalism sells politics. The media’s job is no longer to report reality but to drum up readers and viewers by echoing their politics. As Mir points out, social justice and other tokens of wokeism supply the materials for building this shared identity (p. 103). He produces graphs from the New York Times that show how the paper speaks to its readers in the readers’ language (p. 102). Social media are good for echoing amplifying rumors and trends. Now that all newspapers come in digital form as well as print, print journalists so no longer just print journalists. They stay in the game by being partisan.

Legendary anchors like Cronkite, Rather, and Brokaw embodied the objectivity then expected of news reporting. Contemporary satirists questioned their role. We see this pushback in two revealing works, the 1976 movie Network and the long-running television hit, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (seven seasons, 168 episodes, starting in 1970).

In Network, ratings for the news program are poor, and executives blame the anchorman. His subsequent on-air outbursts spike ratings for the show but, ironically, cause it to be shifted to the network’s entertainment division. His show is soon the most popular program on television, and, in a further irony, soon becomes news of a tragic kind.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show also had a news segment. The show has been seen as revolutionary, a program about a single woman surrounded by sympathetic women who often expressed the resentment of sexism that made Mary Richards, Moore’s character, memorable.

Richard’s contribution was not to create a news role for herself, but, following her network’s lead, to push the news to be more entertaining and more personal—less objective and less serious, less masculine, to refer to then-accepted stereotypes, and more feminine. Richards arranged for Sue Ann (Betty White) to read the news as Ted’s co-anchor. He was given the job of briefing her, but she assured him that she knew what she’s doing and told Ted to “stick a sock in it.” This got a big laugh from The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s audience.

Then, smiling and perky, White read a story about a mudslide that had buried a village in Alaska. She was neither subjective (showing how she felt about the event) nor objective (devoid of personal emotion). Her performance had a single purpose, which was to encourage viewers to feel good, no matter what the news was. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job it was to be bouncy and uplifting. If others made the news seem too serious, she staked out the other extreme. She divorced delivery from content, with results that were appalling rather than entertaining.

The old battle was between seriousness, with news as “truth” and news as entertainment. We might read this as a battle between objectivity and subjectivity—between impartiality and partisanship. In this now-splintered field, there are no theoretical binaries such as objective and subjective. Digital media seem to have shifted the ground. News used to be valued for what it told us about the world outside the home. News is now valued for what it tells us about our own emotional and ideological identity—how it mirrors us, not how it reports everything else.

It has been said that the rising generation is unaware that there actually are legitimate views that differ from their own. These people live in a world in which the audience attends only to media that reflect their own views—i.e., a world that is entirely subjective. Supposedly disciples of diversity, they follow people like themselves and exclude those who differ from them.

Newspapers, in an effort to revise their business model, have taken on the partisanship that is inherent in social media, as we see in the Tribune headline noted above. When the power of social media became apparent, Mir says, print media began to seek progressive customers, and in order to get them, had to become both digital and partisan.

Print media are floundering. Billionaires have tried to rescue important newspapers. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, but the paper continues to lose money. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought The Los Angeles Times, which fired 115 staff members in January 2025. It too is a paper in decline.

Today it takes partisanship to sell newspapers. The opposite seems to have been true in earlier times—and fairly recent, too, when readers had some capacity for impartiality. Various points might be identified as moments when partisanship became pronounced in leading papers and in the American populace.

Was it the Supreme Court’s role in the Bush-Gore election of 2000? Was it the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Was it the slyhly divisive rhetoric of Obama a few years later? All a politician needs to say to get a rousing cheer today is to say he or she will “bring this country together.” Is that still possible?

Some degree of neutrality and impartiality is required for that to happen. Both characteristics are functions of tolerance and of a broad social consensus. Consensus is only possible when ideas are seen as more important than feelings. Consensus is a sign of stability, an anchor. In the digital age, consensus seems to be beyond reach.

June 2025

Sources

American Presidency Project. “George W. Bush Public Approval.” https://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/george-w-bush-public-approval. See May 27, 2025.

CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-statement/. Oct. 20, 2024. Seen May 20, 2025.

Conlon, Tara. “BBC governors overturn ruling on Arafat report.” The Guardian. Nov. 5, 2005. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/nov/25/radio.bbc

Cronkite, Walter. “CBS Evening News Anchor Walter Cronkite Broadcasts His “Report from Vietnam.” Vietnam War Commemoration. Seen May 24, 2025.

https://www.vietnamwar50th.com/1968_tet_and_shifting_views/CBS-Evening-News-Anchor-Walter-Cronkite-Broadcasts-His--8220-Report-from-Vietnam-8221-/#skltbs-demo1

The Economist. “On the final day, Kamala Harris moves into a narrow lead.” Nov. 5, 2024. https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/

prediction-model/president

Flint, Joe. “News Chief Departs as CBS Feels Trump Pressure.” The Wall Street Journal. May 20, 2025. B1, B2.

Gallup News. “Americans' Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low.”

https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx. 2024. Seen May 27, 2025.

Gold, Hadas, Liam Reilly, and Brian Stelter. “Shari Redstone says CBS leaders made ‘bad mistake’ with handling of Ta-Nehisi Coates interview fallout.” https://www.cnn.com/business/media. Oct. 10, 2024. Seen May 20, 2025.

Imry, Gerald, and Aiamer Madhan. “Trump confronts South African leader with baseless claims of the systematic killing of white farmers.” The Chicago Tribune, May 5, 2025. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/05/21/trump-south-africa/

Kenneth L. Khachigian. “Watergate-Style Hearings for the Biden Coverup.” The Wall Street Journal, May 31-June 1, 2025. A13.

Mir, Andrey. “An Obit for Journalism.” City Journal. Winter 2025. 99-105.

NBC. “On Eve of Election Day, Clinton Maintains Her Edge Over Trump.” Nov. 7, 2016. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/data-points/poll-eve-election-day-clinton-maintains-her-edge-over-trump-n678816

Reilly, Katie. “Read Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Remarks About Donald Trump Supporters.” Time, 10 Sept. 2016. https://time.com/section/politics. Seen May 28, 2015.

Rich, Frank. “A Dumb Job: How is it possible that the inane institution of the anchorman has endured for more than 60 years?” New York Magazine. April 5, 2015. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/04/anchors-network-news.html

Sidahmed, Mazon. “The night they can't forget: Hillary Clinton’s supporters recall the election.” The Guardian. Nov. 8, 2017.