What Can a Journalist Do?

Around the turn of the twentieth century, an Irish bartender in Chicago named Martin J. Dooley described how newspapers “comfort the afflicted” and “afflict the comfortable.” This idea has since become a cliché, often brandished as a noble statement of journalistic purpose. Others have echoed the idea without echoing the phrase. The newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer (after whom the Pulitzer Prizes were named) once said that journalists should, among other things, “oppose privileged classes and public plunderers” and “never lack sympathy with the poor.”

Not that everyone likes the sentiment. “There is nothing inherently wrong with being comfortable,” the conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2022, “and afflicting the comfortable—or anyone else—without good reason is almost the textbook definition of being a jerk.” In their classic book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel describe the phrase “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” as having unfortunate liberal overtones. Journalism’s role as a “watchdog,” they argue, is “deeper and more nuanced than the literal sense of afflicting or comforting would suggest,” and “more properly means watching over the powerful few in society to guard, on behalf of the many, against tyranny.”