“Holding the Powerful Accountable”—Empty Words?

“The holding the powerful accountable phrase resonates as it does—and, presumably, is chosen by the news media’s back-patters—because it is, indeed, precisely what a news media should be doing.”

At a May, 2017 event at the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy, the school’s dean, Jack Knott, invoked one version of what might be the news media’s favorite phrase of self-congratulation: that it is here for the purpose of “speaking truth to power.” Later in that same event, Frederick J. Ryan, Jr., the publisher of The Washington Post (and Politico co-founder), continued with that theme. Extolling the courage and professed impartiality of his newspaper’s reporters, he indicated that the goal for journalists—regardless of a given occupant of the White House—is “to challenge power.” He would then close his remarks with a final line that it is the unyielding task of the press to “shine a light into the dark corners of power.”

This phrase—that the news media exists to “hold the powerful accountable”—is slung around near-constantly. In similar form to the Price School event, a 2019 gathering organized by the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University would make this notion of “holding the powerful accountable” the headline under which the event was billed. The Pulitzer Prize Board frequently peppers descriptions of its events, as well as its award citations, with references to “giv[ing] voice to the powerless and hold[ing] the powerful to account.” NBC anchor Lester Holt, when accepting an invitation to join the Committee to Protect Journalists’ board of directors in 2019, stated, “Our profession is under attack every day, from network news broadcasts to local community papers in every corner of the world. And that’s why the job of journalists—to shine light in dark places and hold the powerful accountable—has never been more important.”

Indeed, at face value, this is a worthy ideal for a news media; of course, a society stands to benefit tremendously from journalism that is rigorous, investigatory, and sensitive to the ever-present danger of government, business interests, and the like leveraging their often already-extensive influence to achieve all the more. However, like another favorite declaration of the news media’s—that, in Ryan’s words, it is neither a president’s “support nor his resistance” (or in New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet’s “[The paper’s] job is to cover the hell out of Donald Trump—not be his opponent”)—the holding the powerful accountable applause line tends to be, in practice, similarly vacuous.