In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, the Columbia Journalism Review rests on a false anthropology, and the falseness explains both its method and its blind spots.
CJR, founded in 1961, treats journalism as a profession governed by universal standards: accuracy, fairness, independence, verification. It assumes a reporter is a reasoning individual who can be corrected by argument. A story goes wrong, CJR diagnoses the error, the profession absorbs the lesson, practice improves. That is a liberal model of the journalist: an atomistic actor with a portable ethical code, answerable to standards that hold everywhere, for everyone.
Mearsheimer’s account predicts something different. Journalists are socialized before they reason. They come up through colleges, newsrooms, Slack channels, and award circuits that impose a value infusion long before any individual reporter develops independent judgment about what counts as a story, a source, a scandal, or a fringe view. By the time a reporter can think for himself, the thinking has been done for him. The standards CJR enforces are the moral code of one tribe, presented as the code of the craft.
This predicts CJR’s actual pattern. It sees failures outside the tribe with clarity and speed: Fox News, tabloids, partisan operations. It sees failures inside the tribe late, partially, or never, because those failures flow from the shared value infusion, and the watchdog drank from the same well. When CJR published Jeff Gerth’s long Russiagate retrospective in 2023, the profession mostly ignored it. On Mearsheimer’s account that response is rational. The piece attacked group solidarity, and group solidarity is what careers depend on. No reasoned rebuttal was needed. Silence and ostracism do the work that argument cannot.
It also predicts when CJR succeeds. Its effective interventions are not the ones with the best arguments. They are the ones that mobilize shame within the group, as with the Rolling Stone UVA report in 2015. The tribe excommunicated because the failure threatened the tribe’s standing, not because a syllogism landed. Criticism works when it carries social sanction. Criticism without sanction is a letter to the editor.
The universalism fails too. CJR’s implicit claim, like liberalism’s, is that journalistic standards travel: press freedom is a human right, verification is verification in Lagos and in Brooklyn. Mearsheimer would say journalism everywhere serves group and national loyalties first, and the American model is one tribe’s practice mistaken for a global norm. The repeated disappointment of press-freedom evangelism abroad supports him.
So if he is right, CJR is misnamed twice over. It does not review journalism from outside; it polices the boundary of a coalition from inside. And its remedy, reasoned criticism, addresses the least important of the three sources of belief. The honest version of CJR would drop the pose of the neutral referee and admit it is a clerisy organ enforcing tribal norms, some good, some bad. That admission would cost it the authority the pose generates, which is why it will not happen. The pose is itself a product of socialization, held by editors who absorbed it before they could examine it.
The counterargument deserves a sentence. Sometimes argument does change journalistic practice over decades, the way anonymous-sourcing rules tightened after fabrication scandals, which suggests reason is weak but not inert, and a press review that keeps making arguments may shift the socialization of the next cohort even when it cannot move the current one.
