When Editorials Become Journalism & Journalists Become Bloggers

Andrew Donovan]
Oct 30, 2015
3 min read

I gave myself the arduous task of watching the GOP Debate on Wednesday night. I say arduous not because I’m a Democrat or despise the Republican Party, but because I can’t help but feel like the entire election process is a bit of a charade; particularly in America.

(And here I am looking to become a political journalist.)

It was the first debate I’ve watched in respect to the 2016 election and I felt like I heard it all before. A thousand times over. Donald Trump wants Mexicans to build and pay for a giant wall. Ben Carson opposes gay marriage but isn’t homophobic. Rand Paul wants to audit the fed. The entire debate wasn’t so much a debate as it was a reiteration of each candidate’s platform; “which can be found online at electme2016.com,” as they’d say.

As the debate trudged awkwardly and uneventfully through its two-hour timeslot on CNBC, something else was happening on the internet that leads me to what I want to speak about today.

No. No. It had nothing to do with Patton Oswalt’s satirical and absolutely bizarre commentary that painted each GOP candidate as a fictitious character from another apocalyptic dimension...

What was happening was nothing new. By any means. But that doesn't make it any less...shitty. What was happening was journalists were writing like bloggers who were posting their opinions on their $9.99 domain. Like yours truly. Except the difference was their blogs - OpEds at the absolute best - were being published on highly regarded news websites.

Like I said: nothing new.

But for whatever reason, I was perturbed by the blatant biases of mainstream journalists so much so that I felt compelled to write about it two days later.

I can’t make this any more clear: I don’t support the GOP. That doesn’t make me a Democrat. I’m Andrew Donovan and I’m politically a-sexual; by that I mean I'm going to be the only one screwing myself. Not some suited-up robot with immaculate hair.

I don’t feel the need to name particular journalists or publications in this blog. If you read any commentary – both for and against candidates in the GOP Debate – you likely read commentary that was trying desperately to sell you an idea, a position, a candidate.

It was pathetic. Discouraging.

Shouldn’t a journalist’s job be to report the story? Evidently, that's no longer the case. We’ve now got hordes of journalists turned bloggers writing for news publications turned blogs and they’re all so scared their ideology might come second to that of their nemesis they have to ram home why their ideas are the absolute best. NO. Why their ideas are the absolute gospel! at every opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong, I follow plenty of quality bloggers and news journalists who have opinions like you and me. But when they write opinions, they write an editorial and if they have a lot to say, they write a book. They don’t whore their leanings out on the front-page of a national newspaper or once-monthly magazine because they’re so scared of Carson or Clinton sitting on the world’s throne.

Call me old school, or maybe an idealist, but I think journalism is a field in which the journalist needs to sacrifice his or her opinions for the sake of an unbiased (if there is such a thing) reporting on an event(s). And unbiased reporting shouldn’t be a part of the job description, it should be the entirety of the job description.

But then again, I’m the unemployed writer. What do I know?