It’s very rare in this day and age to come across a “straight news” reporter – especially one who writes for a national outlet – who does not ultimately end up revealing their liberal bias in some way.

We see it on a daily basis with the cast of characters at media outlets like CNN and MSNBC, where being rabidly liberal and “woke” appears to be a non-negotiable requirement for landing a reporting job. Some journalists are more discreet about their biases, only occasionally giving glimpses of them on social media, while others are out in the open and unashamed for anyone to notice it and call it out.

Now-former CBS News reporter Kate Smith is one who fits the latter description, although you wouldn’t know it by how she framed her resignation from the network earlier today. Her Twitter bio used to include the words “covering abortion access and more,” but she did more than just “cover” the abortion issue. Her supposedly neutral reports made clear which side of the debate she stood on, whether she was fretting about abortion access in southern states or writing puff pieces about pro-abortion “feminists” who are “leading the fight” against pro-lifers.

Thursday morning, Smith announced in a series of tweets that she had “quit” her job at CBS News, thanking her “talented colleagues” and “the courageous people” who trusted her to “share their stories”:

Personal news:
I quit my job at CBS News. Covering a beat like reproductive rights at such a legendary institution has been an amazing experience. Thank you to the people that made it possible: My talented colleagues & the courageous people that trusted me to share their stories.

— Kate Smith (@byKateSmith) July 15, 2021

As to why she was leaving the long-running network, Smith explained she wanted to be “candid” about her opinions on abortion, as if she hadn’t made that more than clear through her previous reporting:

Now that I’m not a reporter I can be candid about my own opinions on reproductive rights. I’ll say this: With or without Roe v Wade access to abortion is disappearing across the South and Midwest for low income women. And it’s happening more or less under the radar.

— Kate Smith (@byKateSmith) July 15, 2021

“It’s a pivotal moment for abortion rights,” she further explained, insinuating that it would be her mission to continue to speak on behalf of abortion proponents:

It’s a pivotal moment for abortion rights, and one that deserves a lot of coverage and our attention. Editors, I know there’s reader and viewer fatigue when it seems like the millionth six-week ban. But it still major news and ought to be covered.

— Kate Smith (@byKateSmith) July 15, 2021

Let me start off by saying that I’m not being critical of her decision to leave CBS News. On the contrary, I applaud it. If you’re supposed to be reporting the news from an objective angle but no longer feel that you can, then by all means you need to leave and become an independent writer.

The issue I have is that Smith has never been objective about her feelings on the subject. The pieces she writes as an independent journalist will not sound that much different from what she’s already written on the topic. It’s just that now she’ll be even more blunt and forthright about where she stands.

Straight news reporting is just that – straight news. It’s not about inserting an angle or your personal opinion. It’s about you reporting the facts as they stand and letting the reader form their own opinion rather than you doing it for them.

Smith, like many of her colleagues in the MSM, didn’t do straight news reporting the way it should have been done. Presumably, she was never chastised by her employer for the slanted way she reported on abortion because as noted above it’s an unwritten prerequisite at a lot of these news outlets that you have to be Team Democrat.

The tendency for people going into the journalism industry to want to “make a difference” is only okay if you’re upfront about your biases and choose the publications to write for (or strike out on your own) that are equally upfront. Like if someone started writing for Think Progress or Media Matters, you’d know where they stand because those sites admit as much out in the open.

But because liberal bias is so prevalent at “straight news” outlets like CBS News, the “make a difference” reporters gravitate there because they feel like it’d be a natural fit, a place for them to greatly amplify the message.

It’s the mindset that it’s okay to wear your heart on your sleeve and tout your pet political causes while on the job at these places that has caused trust in the media to plummet over the years. If the mainstream media as an industry wanted to earn back some of that trust, they’d make it a point to stop hiring reporters and editors with agendas and instead emphasize the need to report the facts as they are instead of with a bias behind them.

Setting that standard would discourage agenda-driven reporters like Kate Smith from feeling like they should make a beeline for straight news organizations in the first place.

That’s unlikely to happen, though, especially when you have places like the New York Times openly bragging about making their newsrooms “woker.” Sadly, journalism is for all intents and purposes dead, and all we can do at this point is to call the bad out when we see it and hold them accountable in the court of public opinion.

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