Photo by Leah Millis/Reuters as posted to Al Jazeera.

DEAR NEWS EDITORS: reporting “both sides” is not what it used to be

Y’all are drinking the koolaid today’s GOP dumps on you. They ARE NOT CONSERVATIVES. They are the Radical Right Wing

Georgia NeSmith
4 min readMay 20, 2022

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Listen, I know how you’ve been taught and trained on how to do “objective” journalism.

I used to be one of those journalism professors performing the task of introducing mostly bad writers to the standard rules to which most journalists at mainstream news media are supposed to adhere. You know: The inverted pyramid. The Associated Press Stylebook. And of course, what is fobbed off as “objective journalism: that is reporting “both sides” of any news story.

In politics, that has historically involved reporting what Democrats (i.e. “liberals”) say about an issue, and then getting the Republican (i.e. “conservative” side for “balance.” And vice versa.

Unfortunately, as I know you know, the US political spectrum has become seriously skewed these days. The problem is that ONE of the political parties (guess who) became enamored of Donald Trump because they could use his outrageous and already very public and well known television character to win elections. So, okay, what’s wrong with that?

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Georgia NeSmith

Retired professor, feminist, writer, photographer, activist, grandmother of 5, overall Wise Woman. Phd UIA School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 1994.