Posted on 09/25/2004 11:53:33 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
If you traffic in commentary, especially media criticism, it's getting warm out there. The flourishing community of Web-based blogmeisters -- some of them skilled journalists, many of them fervent partisans -- is transforming the climate in which ideas are floated and tested.
They're a tough crowd. Published work ricochets around the Internet, subjected almost instantly to criticism and denunciation if it's suspected of factual or ideological error -- or both, as with the Web-led assault on CBS for relying on questionable memos about President Bush's time in the National Guard.
One recurring theme in Internet comment targets the unwillingness of journalists in mainstream media (known as MSM, generally a pejorative) to admit to having opinions of their own. If the problem is media bias, as the bloggers insist, why don't journalists simply own up to their predispositions, abandon the pose of neutrality and let audiences evaluate their work accordingly?
This seems reasonable. Indeed, some of the most thoughtful mainstream commentators have acknowledged as much. Jay Rosen of New York University, a father of civic journalism whose PressThink is one of the best media blogs around, referred at a recent nationwide gathering of journalism teachers to the mounting pressure for transparency, of journalists declaring where they stand. Michael Kinsley, editorial page chief of The Los Angeles Times, remarked this month on National Public Radio: "It's a fiction to suppose that reporters don't have political views, and it would be healthier and more honest if they simply said what they were."
Why not? If motive is the issue, since we can't get purity, at least we'll have clarity. But looking closer you find that transparency is rife with problems. What exactly do you disclose? Fine, readers should know whether a reporter covering an electoral campaign is a fierce partisan. But the situation is rarely clear-cut (considering that assigning editors aren't usually that ethically obtuse.)
In fact, the logic of transparency implicates a vast range of predisposition, way beyond Bush vs. Kerry or liberal vs. conservative. Values, beliefs, pre-existing attitudes of many kinds shape any reporter's mind-set, don't they?
What do you cop to? A lifelong mistrust of authority? Abiding sympathy for underdogs? Admiration for entrepreneurs? Many readers find religious faith relevant. Should you acknowledge having doubted the existence of a just and benevolent God as a cautionary note alongside your story about litigation over a comatose child? Might a bitter divorce influence your coverage of lawyers and courts?
How thorough a confessional is required? How much privacy must be given up?
Why confine disclosure to the person who wrote the story or appears on camera? Journalism is a team effort. So we get this reporter's disclosure for an abortion-related story: "I'm a gay man, and have no personal involvement, although my unmarried sister just had an abortion. But my editor is strongly pro-choice, and the headline writer is a born-again. The publisher is a practicing Catholic with seven children and reads everything we run on the subject."
Excessive? Sure. But the likely alternative is that transparency would degenerate into bland formulations from journalists that would be no more revealing than the self-flattery we get from politicians -- "I believe in the sanctity of the family." Aha, I knew it!
Besides, what's the point of all this voir dire? Shouldn't the proof of good or bad reporting be the report itself, especially compared with others?
If a story is skewed, buries some facts and makes corrupt use of others for polemic reasons, won't that emerge from analysis and criticism, not from some half-baked critique of the people who produced it? And if it's a bad piece of work, who cares if the reporter approached the subject free of preconceptions?
To me, the cry for transparency isn't about holding media accountable; it's a way to make certain media discountable. It creates a rationale for ignoring content you dislike by dismissing it as the deliberate product of unshakable prejudice.
Instead of ad hominem critiques, we're better off focusing on what matters: subjecting reporting to the test of truthfulness, and argument to the test of persuasiveness. That's terrain we can all fight on.
Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia.
Thank you, thank you. I'm part of this tough crowd. But I stand in awe of some of the REALLY tough crowd here, like Buckhead, Congressmanbillybob, and holdonnow.
MEGA barf!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Obviously this guy has much bilge to disclose!
Yuk Yuk Yuk. No wonder we think the media is so biased.
Although he did leave out the part about relations with animals....
The issue is not just how "journalists" cover the news, but what they cover and what they ignore. That is where the bias is sometimes most pronounced. If, for example, all they cover from Iraq is bad news while they ignore any hint that there might be progress, it doesn't matter what adjectives they use, or how they construct sentences ... it matters that they are presenting only that which benefits their partisan interests.
This exclusionary dynamic also facilitates the individual story biases, such as has been exhibited in some of the reporting about Allawi's speech, i.e., "Is Allawi having the same fantasy as Bush?"
Actually breakdown by party would be fine with me. If the reporter did not vote, then they would be a lazy moron....
Exactly! The omission and shaping of the news is purely partisan bias.
Ok waterboy here is a truth, you are a communist!
In essence, to repeat an old observation, Republicans can do no good, Democrats can do no bad. It happens time and again, and thankfully, many in America have finally caught on. I say finally because it has taken over a decade since the mighty Rush took to the airwaves for the the broad consciousness of the people in this country to understand the relationship between leftist politicians and the biased, leftist MSM. The tide turned a while back, and merciful God in heaven, please let it get stronger and utterly destroy the left. What a disgusting, diseased, festering boil they are.
Hurt their sponsors and affiliates and it won't matter what the network is "willing" to be. Once they become commercially radioactive, they'll either get honest or go extinct. Either outcome is fine by me.
The First Amendment means that they can post that code as prominently as they want - and it means that they don't have to live up to it.
Truth-telling about what?The dirty little secret of journalism is that story selection and emphasis is a portrait of the perspective of the journalist. And that is the first truth that a journalist should tell, that is the start of transparency.
The truth is that journalism's unwritten rule - Thou shalt not question the objectivity of thy fellow journalist - is simply a go along and get along strategy for avoiding flame wars. And that avoiding flame wars is - as the highest priority of a reporter - describable in only one way - gutless.
How much transparency is required? Only enough to tell us what you want to believe. Enough to let us judge whether you are making disclosures against your own interest - or whether you are merely venting your own predelictions and calling it objective truth.
If you claim to be wise you merely close off the possibilty of debate - you are announcing that your mind is already made up. And a claim of objectivity is indistinguishable in effect from a claim of wisdom.
By all means tell us the truth to the best of your ability - but admit that you are human and fallible. Or expect to be found out by the blogosphere.
Ping to my #13.
EDWARD WASSERMAN is talking in circles in order to muddy the water.
In short, NO. We here all know that the Rathergate story buried the facts that the principal interviewee was a partisan Democrat fundraiser, that Rather himself gave a fundraiser to the county Democrat party he was from, and that there were numerous sources disputing the main facts of the story. Yet this information is still mostly ignored by the MSM. The MSM simply cannot be counted on to portray both sides of the story.
BUMP!
Old media "journalists" have no problem finding effective advocates and arguements for modern liberal/socialist policies because of their intimate familiarity with advocates and arguements for modern liberal/socialist policies. Old media "journalists" have no idea what an effective advocate or arguement for classic liberal/conservative policies would be so they have no idea what to look for.
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