THE PUBLIC EDITOR - It's Good to Be Objective. It's Even Better to Be Right.

New York Times ^ | November 14, 2004 | DANIEL OKRENT

[68skylark]

IN my Oct. 31 column, I took a crude hatchet to The Times's wimpy reliance on "experts," "analysts" and other commentators whose words may decorate a given article but often provide neither coherence nor much more than the illusion of balance.

Surprisingly, I didn't hear from any experts determined to defend their positions in the address books of Times reporters. Maybe that's because some of them have established impregnable beachheads: Prof. Stephen Gillers of N.Y.U. has made 24 appearances in The Times so far this year (five under his own name, the rest in pieces by Times writers); Tom Wolzien of Sanford C. Bernstein and Company has shown up 28 times; and the inevitable Gene Russianoff has appeared fully 46 times, in pieces by 23 different writers. Russianoff is a "staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a transit advocacy group," a label The Times has slapped on him the way Homer glued "gray-eyed goddess" to Athena.

Russianoff has been the Oracle of the Subways since ... well, almost since there were straps for straphangers. (New to the city 35 years ago, I thought the word was pronounced "straffengers," with a soft g.)

Times reporters assure me that he is reliable, honest and well informed. I believe this to be true, as I'm confident it is of Gillers and Wolzien as well, and maybe even of Hall of Famer Norman Quotestein, a k a Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute.

But if I believe these experts are all good and wise, it's because I believe the reporters who tell me so. Why, I wonder, do I need the analysis of an expert or the expertise of the analyst, when it's the writer I'm finally compelled to rely upon in any case?

In fact, there are often good reasons to turn to experts - for instance, when the desk dumps an assignment in your lap three hours before deadline, on a subject you know little about. But there's also the need to protect that precious piece of the journalistic ethos, objectivity - in the words of one deputy news editor, Philip Corbett, "not only a worthy goal, but probably our most important one: the goal that underpins most of our other ideals, like fairness and accuracy." And reporters think that getting an "expert" to comment adds the aura of objectivity.

In recent years, though, the concept of objectivity has taken a bit of a beating. Some journalists (and critics of journalists) argue that it is in fact unachievable; we all bring our experiences, sensibilities and innate prejudices to the door, and even the act of attempting to leave them on the stoop will alter our approach.

Besides, you can't police objectivity simply by scouring an article for evidences of bias, imbalance or other taints. Try starting with the headline writer, who is inherently constrained by space yet charged with distilling essences from what is often an extremely complex stew - a necessarily reductive act that can't help but deform nuances. Then there's the editor who determines placement: "Ex-C.I.A. Chief Nets $500,000 on Talk Circuit" would have been interesting on A26 last Thursday; on A1, it carried a suggestion of scandal.

And before an article finds its way into the paper - sometimes long before - the decision to assign it is itself influenced by personal predisposition. "In Health Care, Gap Between Rich and Poor Persists, W.H.O. Says," also in Thursday's paper, was a discretionary choice. It made it into print on one desk editor's watch, but could have been just as plausibly ignored had someone else, with even a slightly different worldview, been sitting in the same chair that day. As for major investigative pieces, they generally start not because they are propelled by a piece of news but because a reporter or an editor determines - often out of white-hot passion - that "This is important. This is something we must do." Most investigations, by nature, carry a point a view.

When it comes to objectivity, then, the determinative factor is who's doing the determining. In any enterprise, there are few decisions as important as whom you hire and promote; in a newspaper, where every choice has meaning, it's virtually the only thing that matters.

The historical roots of objectivity as a journalistic ideal suggest there's more to it than parking one's opinions at the curb. Before it was applied specifically to journalism, the idea of objectivity grew out of a variety of early 20th century intellectual movements recognizing that somewhere in the swamps of conscious and unconscious thought, people could be biased without knowing it. By the 1920's Walter Lippmann and others were arguing that reporters could combat unconscious bias by applying scientific method and its "sense of evidence" to journalistic inquiry. Only by the rigorous testing of hypotheses could the investigator - the journalist - reach reliable, bias-free conclusions. The key word, and the one that has disappeared from the definition over several generations, is "conclusions." Fairness requires the consideration of all sides of an issue; it doesn't require the uncritical reporting of any. Yet even the best reporters will sometimes display a disappointing reluctance to set things straight.

THAT'S why I was so exasperated last June, shortly after Ronald Reagan's death, to see a classic balancing statement pop up and sit there unchallenged, in an article by Robin Toner and Robert Pear. "Critics See a Reagan Legacy Tainted by AIDS, Civil Rights and Union Policies" (June 9, 2004) included this: "Gary Bauer, Mr. Reagan's domestic policy adviser for the last two years of his administration, countered that spending on AIDS research rose under Mr. Reagan." Bauer's comment may have balanced what Reagan's detractors had to say, but the writers' failure to challenge it denied readers an objective truth: AIDS funding couldn't help but rise under Reagan, because there was no AIDS funding before Reagan - in fact, there was no AIDS before Reagan.

I suspect that when writers don't comment on specious statements, it's usually because they worry that any challenge might itself seem tendentious. And it's true that many readers do find conclusive statements objectionable. Reporter Jodi Wilgoren provoked a flood of complaints when she described John Kerry in April as "a social loner" without attributing her characterization to anyone - as if her own experience covering the senator, and discussing him with scores of his friends and associates, were not evidence enough. Similarly, readers complained when Neil Lewis, in "Mixed Results for Bush in Battles Over Judges" (Oct. 22), followed a description of the president's early judicial appointments with this: "There could have been no clearer signal that Mr. Bush intended to follow the pattern set by his father and President Ronald Reagan of shifting the courts rightward and reaping the political benefit of pleasing social conservatives." Those who objected argued that it was the writer's opinion, and improper - even though, as one acknowledged, it was undeniably true.

But haven't we reached the point where denying the reader what a writer knows to be true is far more unfair than including it? I was delighted when, in "After 6 Months, Tyco Prosecutors Close Case Against Ex-Officials" (March 18), Alex Berenson described the prosecutor's case as "bewildering," "tedious" and having "rarely been presented in a straightforward way" - a vision of the trial that would have been utterly unavailable had Berenson not dared to offer conclusive characterizations based on his own observations. On a much larger scale, I was dismayed when a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in a letter to friends (later passed around the Internet) described the horrors of life in Baghdad, and was criticized in some quarters for thereby jeopardizing her impartiality. But what she described was based on indisputable first-hand experience. If there was a journalistic offense here, it was that readers of The Journal had been denied knowledge of what this reporter knew to be true. Whom did that serve?

I shouldn't knock The Journal, which admirably allows its reporters far more authority to make assertions in their own voices than most American dailies, and which hasn't asked me to be its public editor. My beat's here on West 43rd Street, where some of the very best journalists in the country keep what they know off the page because they've been tied up by an imprecise definition of objectivity. I'm not calling for unsupported opinion, but for a flowering of facts - not just those recorded stenographically or uttered by experts, but the sort that arise from experience, knowledge and a brave willingness to stand behind what you know to be true.

The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

[68skylark]

I don't agree with Mr. Okrent all the time. But overall I really like his columns -- he's willing to raise questions that are long past due for discussion.

[John Thornton]

Okrent is always willing to criticize The New York Times---for being too conservative.

[68skylark]

I'm afraid I'll have to respectfully disagree. He wrote a landmark column that clearly said the NY Times was a "liberal" newspaper. How many people in the mainstream press have written that kind of column?

Here's the link:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E7D8173DF936A15754C0A9629C8B63

[John Thornton]

Yes, that was a decent column. But, I have read too many columns where he criticized the paper for "believing Bush about the WMDs" and other cases of being too conservative. Until the last month, I subscribed to that rag and almost always came away disgusted.

[68skylark]

There were a few stories in the Times where they said, in effect, "sorry we weren't more anti-war." But as I recall, those stories weren't written by Okrent.

I could be wrong, but that's my recollection.

[John Thornton]

ping