"Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press"
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Skepticism is a great house style until it turns out the house has glass walls.
Griffith, an editor speaking from inside the institution, is diagnosing a boomerang effect: the press spent decades training audiences to doubt official narratives, interrogate motives, and treat public statements as performance. That stance won journalism its modern authority. It also quietly positioned journalism as the arbiter of what deserves belief. The line snaps when that same tool gets pointed back at the newsroom. "Preached and practiced" is doing more than doubling emphasis; it’s a subtle admission of moral branding. Skepticism wasn’t just a method, it became a public identity the press sold as virtue.
The subtext carries a faint, chastened irony. Griffith isn’t lamenting that the public became cynical out of nowhere; he’s admitting the press helped manufacture the culture of suspicion. And now the press wants an exemption from the very standards it normalized: show me your sources, disclose your incentives, explain your framing. The phrase "Now, it finds" lands like a delayed consequence, the institutional equivalent of surprise at predictable backlash.
Contextually, this reads like a pre-internet warning shot that feels eerily native to the post-trust era: Watergate’s afterglow, Vietnam’s credibility gap, the rise of media self-importance, then the dawning realization that gatekeepers can be interrogated like any other power center. Griffith’s intent isn’t to scold the public; it’s to remind his own profession that skepticism, once unleashed, doesn’t honor press credentials.
Griffith, an editor speaking from inside the institution, is diagnosing a boomerang effect: the press spent decades training audiences to doubt official narratives, interrogate motives, and treat public statements as performance. That stance won journalism its modern authority. It also quietly positioned journalism as the arbiter of what deserves belief. The line snaps when that same tool gets pointed back at the newsroom. "Preached and practiced" is doing more than doubling emphasis; it’s a subtle admission of moral branding. Skepticism wasn’t just a method, it became a public identity the press sold as virtue.
The subtext carries a faint, chastened irony. Griffith isn’t lamenting that the public became cynical out of nowhere; he’s admitting the press helped manufacture the culture of suspicion. And now the press wants an exemption from the very standards it normalized: show me your sources, disclose your incentives, explain your framing. The phrase "Now, it finds" lands like a delayed consequence, the institutional equivalent of surprise at predictable backlash.
Contextually, this reads like a pre-internet warning shot that feels eerily native to the post-trust era: Watergate’s afterglow, Vietnam’s credibility gap, the rise of media self-importance, then the dawning realization that gatekeepers can be interrogated like any other power center. Griffith’s intent isn’t to scold the public; it’s to remind his own profession that skepticism, once unleashed, doesn’t honor press credentials.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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