I’m familiar with the article, and I don’t think the quotes are out of context or unrepresentative. I agree with Lowery’s high-level point. Objectivity is aspirational, and reporters can’t help but color their reporting with their personal experiences. When Black and brown people are underrepresented in the profession, the pretense of “objectivity” can amount to a gloss on the facts from predominantly white reporters. I agree with all of that, and the solution is to hire more Black and brown reporters.

Where Lowery goes wrong is espousing “moral clarity” and “the truth” as the goal of reporting rather than objectivity. When Lowery talks about “the truth” he means “The Truth.” That doesn’t mean propaganda or naked partisanship. But it does imply the application of the reporter’s moral framework to synthesize “The Truth” from the uncontested facts.

He clear illustration of this lies further down in the article: “Moral clarity would insist that politicians who traffic in racist stereotypes and tropes — however cleverly — be labeled such with clear language and unburied evidence.”

How do you apply this rule in practice? Whether something is a “racist trope” is a characterization, not objective truth. The New York Times itself has published quite a stark illustration of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...

> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”

> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.

> These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.

The progressive pollsters who conducted the study above considered the rhetoric above as “obviously racist and divisive.” A typical New York Times reporter shares the same ideological framework, and would characterize that rhetoric as such. Under Lowery’s approach, she would report that as “the truth.”

But that’s not “the truth.” It’s a characterization under a particular moral framework. My mom (a Muslim immigrant from a country with lots of crime and political instability) would consider the Trumpian statement to be common sense. And according to the survey data, so would most people of color. What a reporter following Lowery’s approach would report as “the truth” would in fact be a falsity to most of the people affected by the statements.

That’s the basic problem with the approach Lowery espouses. It frees reporters to apply their own moral frameworks (which are not necessarily widely shared) to the neutral facts to derive “the truth.”

I also can’t help but point out that when Lowery talks about “Black and brown” viewpoints, he means “some Black and brown viewpoints.” At the end of the day, the white liberals in charge of the times aren’t going to hire reporters to write from the point of view of religious conservative Black and brown people (who are the majority). I’m an immigrant from a Muslim country and I am reading many Muslim reporters now in the Times, etc. But none of them sound like my mom. They almost uniformly hold white progressive moral views, many of which would be totally rejected by nearly all Muslims. A third of Muslims voted for Trump in 2020. You’ll never hear from them in the Times.

This selective amplification is a bigger problem under Lowery’s approach. The Times hires say Muslim reporters to provide more of the point of view of “brown people” and encourages them to apply their moral framework to synthesize facts into “the truth.” But the ones the paper hires have views that are actually unrepresentative of Muslims. So what exactly is the end product?

As to the point about the Republican Party—calling it a “refuge for white supremacists” goes beyond your narrow observation. It’s also statistically true that almost all American communists will vote Democrat. That doesn’t make the worth a “refuge for communists” (although Breitbart likes to characterize it that way to generate outrage).