Gerard Baker Quotes
A crippling fallacy that characterizes our modern media is the idea that every event that rises to the level of news must connote some wider societal or political crisis that can only be remedied by government intervention. Tragedies, natural disasters, acts of unspeakable evil aren’t simply to be reported and explained for what they often are: the products of individual will or negligence, irremediable human malignity or some complex set of scientific interactions. Instead each event—from lethal accidents to vicious murders to Category 5 hurricanes—is immediately sorted into its prelabeled moral narrative file, each one full of similarly useful sententious parables. They become props in the larger drama that is being constantly written for us by the preachy puritans who now control most news organizations, convenient plot devices to illustrate the virtue of their cause and the malevolence of that of their critics.
Even as late as the 1970s most media organizations did not feel any inhibition about having a spokesperson for a political movement or candidate comment about statements that were clearly untrue. The constant political criticism of the media produced this change and no matter how absurd or false a political statement is, most media will have a spokesperson for the lie appear on the program to repeat the lie. Both political parties are thereby encouraged to exaggerate or even lie as they will never by exposed by trusted journalists and can reduce all falsehoods to a “he says, she says.”
Gerard Baker writes the Editor at Large column for Review. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. He served as Editor-in-Chief between 2013 and 2018, and was Deputy Editor-in-Chief between 2009 and 2013. Previously, he was U.S. editor and an assistant editor of the Times of London. In 1994, he joined the Financial Times as Tokyo correspondent, moving on to head the paper's Washington bureau and serving as the FT's chief U.S. commentator. He also covered economics for the BBC and worked as an economist at the Bank of England and Lloyds. Mr. Baker holds a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University.
