The Fulcrum recently asked whether journalistic objectivity should be the standard in reporting. Jeff Prudhomme, vice president of the Interactivity Foundation, provided a lengthy response shared below.
Journalism should absolutely focus on truth-telling, because democracy can’t survive without truthful information. Democracy depends on citizens and policymakers being able to make informed, reality-based decisions. That’s why autocratic politicians, whether abroad or at home, lie all the time. They want people to despair of ever knowing what’s really true — and come to trust the autocratic leader as the only source of truth.
I would frame the problem with journalism, however, not in terms of its “objectivity” focus, but its “neutrality” focus. Seeking objectivity implies that there is an “object” — reality — that is knowable by careful reporting. It means taking a truth-telling perspective, even if those truths are uncomfortable and offend some people. “Neutrality,” on the other hand, literally means “neither one nor the other,” so you have to distance yourself from either side.
The neutrality focus of political journalism especially leads to the temptation to find two sides to every story, creating false equivalencies. Often it acts as a stenographer, uncritically reporting both the truth and the lie, leaving the audience to sort it out. It forces a kind of symmetry on every situation — even when the situation is asymmetrical.
As many journalism critics have noted, a symmetrical description of an asymmetrical reality is an active distortion of the truth. We see the consequences of this in how the public ends up being misinformed. Compared to a year ago, more people today believe the Big Lie that Donald Trump really won the last election. More people today incorrectly believe that unemployment is worse now than a year ago.
How much of this is due to journalism focusing on maintaining neutrality rather than telling the truth? How much of it is due to the savvy approach of political journalism that portrays every issue like a game between two equivalent sides, as the journalist floats neutrally above — even when our democracy hangs in the balance? How much of this problem also pertains to the civil dialogue movement, especially if we adopt a similar free-floating neutrality even in the face of the rising antidemocratic forces of autocracy in our own country?
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.