Conservatives have noted and lamented the left-wing bias of the mainstream media over the last two or three decades. For years, reporters and liberals denied any sort of bias in news reporting. Now, though, some reporters are just coming out and admitting that they're OK with violating a "cardinal rule of journalism" by omitting facts and information that they find uncomfortable.
On Tuesday, former NBC "Today" host Katie Couric admitted that she and other reporters take these kinds of actions "all the time."
What did she say?
Couric appeared on "Today" to discuss her new memoir with host Savannah Guthrie. During the interview, Guthrie pressed her predecessor on a passage of the book that made headlines last week.Couric has now admitted that she covered up remarks by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg condemning athletes who kneel during the national anthem. According to Couric, she cut the justice's uncomfortable remarks from her reporting in order to "protect" Ginsburg.
Guthrie questioned the ethics of such a move during the Monday interview.
"You decided to leave out newsworthy comments that she made on the subject of kneeling during the national anthem," Guthrie began. "How did you justify that? It violates a cardinal rule of journalism to do that."
Couric was happy to justify her move by saying that reporters and editors do it "all the time."
"I think what people don't realize is we make editorial decisions like that all the time," she answered. "And I chose to talk about this and put it in the book for a discussion. I mention that it was a conundrum, that I asked Justice Ginsburg about Colin Kaepernick and taking the knee and how she felt about that. And I did include the fact that she said it was dumb and disrespectful, it was stupid and arrogant, and quite a bit of what she said."
But Guthrie pushed back on this point, which Couric, naturally, attempted to dodge.
"Let me push you on it a little bit, because she did make those comments," Guthrie said. "You said in the book that you wanted to protect her. That's not an occasion where you're using that objectivity that's so important to us journalists.
"The question is whether that undermines journalism at a time when reporters are under attack for bias," she continued.
Couric responded by first obfuscating and then admitting, when Guthrie continued to push, that she "should have included" the full Ginsburg comments in her original report.
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