Two different pictures and a confusion of masks

I’ve seen two very different pictures of journalism and journalists in the past week. One that is prominent and almost everyone sees. One that is more isolated and rarely rises to the level of the public consciousness.

Ironically, it is the latter that is the more common and more truly reflective of the profession. It is, sadly, the former that often defines the popular narrative.

In the first, a familiar, high-profile network anchor — who grew up in the Northwest suburbs, as it happens — found himself suspended from his job after unleashing a personal political tirade on social media about President Donald Trump and his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. ABC’s Terry Moran was certainly within his constitutional rights to express derogatory and demeaning sentiments about the character and motivations of two prominent public figures, but in certain circumstances, one’s constitutional rights and his professional duties cannot coexist. A person must choose one or the other.

Moran, unfortunately, chose his constitutional rights, at least until he took down his offending post — too late, of course, as it always is in these cases. Not only too late for Moran, who lost his job on Tuesday, but for his network and his profession, too.

ABC may have been completely honest when representatives declared in a statement that the network holds “all of our reporters to the highest standards of objectivity, fairness and professionalism.” But that predictable corporate response, sadly, will be overshadowed in too much of the public mind by an assessment more akin to Miller’s post on X: “For decades, the privileged anchor and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose. Terry pulled off his mask.”

I could write reams in response to Miller’s post but nothing that would surpass the narrative last week of a daylong Illinois Press Association conference of workshops and celebration last week in an unimposing hotel in East Peoria, Illinois.

The conference itself was probably not that different from what you would expect at a meeting of representatives for any industry. But as I contemplated Miller’s words regarding Moran in the wake of my experience in central Illinois, I was struck by the profound difference between the world of journalism that you see and the one that you don’t see.

At last week’s sessions, there was no talk of political hatred or of ways to promote or denigrate one political point of view or another. There was instead a constant theme of how do we do a better job of connecting with our communities, stimulating good work in them, identifying bad work and merely informing them about what is going on.

Even more remarkable was the range of people sharing information and successes. They included everyone from top executives at large daily operations to representatives from weekly publications whose entire employee complement ranged in the single digits. They celebrated photographs of children on playgrounds and stories of local government and school board meetings no less than pictures of major sporting events or investigations of community drug houses.

There were publishers and CEOs who sell advertising, take pictures and write news reports. There were reporters who risk their own safety to tell important stories. There were top newsroom editors who take video and post YouTube content.

There was one reporter’s description of an enterprise project expressed in terms I had not thought of in 50 years in this business and now will never forget: “We realized that our job was not to ask the questions that made the subject feel uncomfortable; it was to ask the questions that made us feel uncomfortable.”

There was an atmosphere that was electric with enthusiasm, among people who are far from privileged and who work long hours for low pay, many of them for companies that are struggling just to be able to present these stories. You could not help but want the world to see this side of journalism, these dedicated, hardworking, community-oriented, everyday folks, who far outnumber the handful of rich network and podcasting celebrities everyone knows. You could not help feeling fortunate just to be in their presence.

Of course, each of them has his or her own political philosophies. And none of us is immune from ever making some embarrassing mistake. But the most frustrating result of the Moran case is its implication that a stupid aberration on an incendiary topic by a high-profile individual is representative of the consistent behaviors of an entire profession of little-known local individuals devoted to honestly and objectively describing people and events around them.

If there is, as Miller would say, a mask involved here, it is not a sinister deception intended to keep you from seeing who the journalists working to bring you the news really are. It is the occasional unfortunate distortion that makes you think those journalists are something they really are not.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His new book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.