Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth. If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists. The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear…
Truth or not, newspapers fund themselves by flattering their readers' opinions. Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil, gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y. Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscripti…
The public are still free to care which truthful things they care about (or want to pay attention to)—and part of the job of politics is still to try to direct attention toward aspects of truth that favor your political aims. But with sufficiently many truth-motivated reporting organs reflecting sufficiently many constituencies, the work of truth-finding gets done.
That, I think, is the loss.