The value of independence in journalism
An essay in the Columbia Journalism Review by A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, explains why The Times’s guiding principle is independence.
“Independence is the increasingly contested journalistic commitment to following facts wherever they lead. It places the truth — and the search for it with an open yet skeptical mind — above all else. Those may sound like blandly agreeable clichés of Journalism 101, but in this hyperpolarized era, independent journalism and the sometimes counterintuitive values that animate it have become a radical pursuit.
Independence asks reporters to adopt a posture of searching, rather than knowing. It demands that we reflect the world as it is, not the world as we may wish it to be. It requires journalists to be willing to exonerate someone deemed a villain or interrogate someone regarded as a hero. It insists on sharing what we learn — fully and fairly — regardless of whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be. Independence calls for plainly stating the facts, even if they appear to favor one side of a dispute. And it calls for carefully conveying ambiguity and debate in the more frequent cases where the facts are unclear or their interpretation is under reasonable dispute, letting readers grasp and process the uncertainty for themselves.”