Marketplace is a radio program produced by American Public Media, and it's heard on many public radio stations. A transgender reporter, Lewis Wallace was recently fired from his position at Marketplace for posting the following on his personal blog:

Like a lot of people, I’ve been losing sleep over the news of the last week. As a working journalist, I’ve been deeply questioning not just what our role is in this moment, but how we must change what we are doing to adapt to a government that believes in “alternative facts” and thrives on lies, including the lie of white racial superiority [...]

One of the diciest issues as we reconsider our role as journalists in this moment is that of “objectivity.” Some argue that if we abandon our stance of journalistic neutrality, we let the “post-fact” camp win. I argue that our minds — and our listeners’ and readers minds — are stronger than that, strong enough to hold that we can both come from a particular perspective, and still tell the truth. And I have the sense that this distinction is important in this moment, because we are going to have to fight for and defend what it means to serve the public as journalists.

1.

Neutrality isn’t real: Neutrality is impossible for me, and you should admit that it is for you, too.... [C]an people of color be expected to give credence to “both sides” of a dispute with a white supremacist, a person who holds unscientific and morally reprehensible views on the very nature of being human? Should any of us do that? Final note here, the “center” that is viewed as neutral can and does shift; studying the history of journalism is a great help in understanding how centrism is more a marketing tactic to reach broad audiences than actual neutrality. Many of the journalists who’ve told the truth in key historical moments have been outliers and members of an opposition, here and in other countries. And right now, as norms of government shift toward a “post-fact” framework, I’d argue that any journalist invested in factual reporting can no longer remain neutral.

[...]

3.

We can (and should) still tell the truth and check our facts: The job of storytelling, of truth-telling, is not going away. But it is getting harder and more complex, in the face of unknowable datasets, lying federal leaders, Facebook algorithm dominance and a changing but also opaque market for online news that tends to bring the foamiest of fluff to the top and confuses even the most savvy consumers. All of that said, the people consuming news are savvy. They know that news is curated and complex; that the editorial choice of what to report and how to report it is always a subjective one; that facts are real, but so are priorities and perspective. I think we are past the point where they expect us to speak to a fictitious and ever-shifting center in order to appear “neutral.” In other words, we can check our facts, tell the truth, and hold the line without pretending that there is no ethical basis to the work that we do.

4.

... To call a politician on a lie is our job; to bring stories of the oppressed to life is our job; to represent a cross-section of our communities is our job; to tell the truth in the face of “alternative facts” and routine obscuring is our job; and we can do all that without promoting the male-centric and whitewashed falsehood of objectivity.

There's much more, and I urge you to read Wallace's full blog post, but his essential point is conveyed in the above excerpt. Telling the truth is what is crucial, not simply reporting both sides of the story when one side is obviously false or misleading, and the other side is based on known facts. Objectivity in journalism does not demand a "neutrality." Quite the contrary.

Marketplace immediately suspended Wallace for violating its "ethics code" (you can read it here). The specific violations that were mentioned to Wallace were that he violated Marketplace's goal of reporting the news with "objectivity and neutrality," though, as Wallace points out, neither of those words is included in the Marketplace's ethics code itself, His bosses were concerned about Wallace's position, as expressed on his personal blog, that reporters should not be afraid to be labeled "politically correct" or "liberal." They said this to Wallace even though they admitted no one in particular had called them to complain about his blog post or reporting. His suspension from work was (allegedly) purely about Wallace's violation of their ethics code.

His superiors demanded the blog post be taken down and Wallace complied. However, after doing so Wallace was not reinstated, nor did management respond to his pleas for an explanation as to why the suspension continued. Wallace put the post back up on Saturday, after writing management a letter describing why he did not feel he had violated their "ethics code" (scroll down to end of the Medium article to read that letter under the heading "My last communication with Marketplace before I was fired").

On Monday, Marketplace's VP fired Wallace effective immediately, claiming that he wanted to be an activist and do advocacy journalism rather than perform his duty as an objective reporter for their organization. However, it seems apparent to me that management at Marketplace, whether at the behest of one of its sponsors, or out of an an overabundance of fear that a mere post to a personal blog Marketplace had encouraged Wallace to create to build his "personal brand," would create difficulties for them either with covering the Trump administration or with their donor base, or both.

Regardless, this firing will have a chilling effect on how reporters in other media outlets, whether privately owned or not-for-profit entities such as APR, cover the "news" and what they say to one another or others when they aren't "on the job." Most states do not have any laws that protect journalists from such punitive measures when they express their own opinions outside the workplace (New York is on of the few exceptions, along with California, Colorado, North Dakota - of all places - and the District of Columbia).

Lewis Wallace wanted to start a dialogue with other reporters about how to cover the news in a era when our politicians and prominent news figures uniformly lie, and their lies are ever more patently false, whether they come from persons on the "right" or the "left." What he received instead was the loss of his job, one he had performed admirably for many years at Marketplace out of it's New York office. I hope he gets legal counsel and sues Marketplace and APM for wrongful termination under New York law (or California law, since APM is based out of California), and I also hope a more courageous media outlet hires him as soon as possible so he can continue his career.

Unfortunately, however, most reporters and journalists live or work in jurisdictions that do not protect journalists for expressions of their beliefs or opinions made outside the confines of their workplaces. Once again, as we saw during the Bush years, media companies, appear to be kowtowing to what is deemed acceptable by "The Powers that Be" in government and out. If a journalist is unable to express his or her opinion outside the workplace, how much more likely is it that the news we receive is, as Wallace pointed out in his original blog post, subject to distortion by the people "who [are] making editorial decisions" on what does and what does not get covered?

Thus, we can rest assured among the consolidated, highly concentrated corporate media outlets that "bias" will only be permitted and "facts" will only be reported if they are acceptable to upper management and/or their advertisers. This, of course is not new, but the firing of a reporter at a non-profit public radio outlet over a blog post that frankly only a few hundred or possible thousand people may have read is bordering on absurdist farce if it wasn't so serious. For who among us does not want reporting that avoids the false "objectivity" of reporting both sides of the controversy, when it is well know there is no controversy and that one side has all the facts and the other has all the bullshit?

Lewis Wallace's great sin was stating what everyone already knows - that our major media outlets lie to us, or mislead us, every day, through what they fail to cover or through their own "fake neutrality" in deciding how to cover events. His firing reminds us that we are ever more the victims of propaganda that to paraphrase one of our former Presidents, is continually being catapulted at us, battering us with a barrage of half-truths and outright lies to keep us from seeing the underlying truth that they are nothing more than mouthpieces for those in power who are desperate to maintain the status quo no matter what the cost to the rest of us.