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The Proper Role of Journalism is reporting, from the trivial to the critical such as fraud and corruption-- whereever that may be found -- whether in Politics, or Industry, or elsewhere -- no matter.

See, that is actually more of a problem, philosophically, than the journalist would have anyone suspect. Would you say that that was "the Proper Role of Journalism" in the Founding Era, before the advent of the telegraph and the Associated Press, and before the high speed printing press?
Not so. Back then (when the First Amendment was written and adopted!), newspapers were typically weekly, and some didn't even have a deadline at all- the printer made a press run whenever he was good and ready! Back then, the printer didn't have the AP "wire," and he therefore had no reliable source of data on outside events distinct from what was available to the owner of the local general store or saloon. IOW, "newspapers" were actually not so big on actual news as we now know it.
And back then, Hamilton and Jefferson each sponsored a newspaper to attack the politics of other. And people didn't blink at that, because newspapers had neither motive nor opportunity to claim objectivity. Let me be clear - of course any given paper could have, and might have, claimed to be objective. And of course, if they could have pulled it off, it would have been a coup. But without the AP, newspapers were actually competitors, in a way that they no longer are. If you have actual ideological competition, pretentious claims get deflated pretty quick - and claims of "journalistic objectivity" are just that, and nothing more.
The key to all claims of "journalistic objectivity" lies in the fact that although we have many newspapers and many broadcasters, they do not compete for the respect of the public but rather they all collude to promote "journalism" in general - merely competing on how fresh their reports are. Now, if there is a tornado headed your way, you want to be told in time to get your family into a shelter, not after it has killed them and maimed you. But most news reports are not actionable. Most news stories are not actually significant - and of those that are, most of them could have been improved with a little more time to get the fact straight before they went to press, with no loss of actual utility to the reader. Which is more to be respected, the endless clatter of "news" stories promoting the Nifong/Mangum "Duke Lacrosse Rape" fraud, or the book Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, which punctures the prior year's reporting on the case?
Similarly, To Set the Record Straight tells you more about the struggle to inform the voting public about Senator Kerry's "record of valor in Vietnam" than you will learn from any number of sympathetic reports of the plaints of Kerry and his sympathizers about "Swiftboating." One chapter of which, Rather's Ruin and the Rise of the Pajamahadeen, documents the exposure, started on FR, of the Mapes/Rather "Killian Memo" hoax. After the infamous 60 Minutes report imploded, CBS formed an "independent investigation" for the purpose of concluding that this climax of Mapes' five-year vendetta against Bush "was not politically motivated." And - the key point - none of CBS's so-called competitors belabored CBS on its patent dishonesty. ABC did mention the fact that the CBS report was wrong, but that is hardly to be compared with, say, The New York Times's treatment of Abu Graib. If Coke found out that Pepsi had motor oil in it, don't you think that Coke's marketing would somehow make the point that Coke was better in that regard?
The claim that journalism even could be - let alone that it actually is - objective is a symptom of the fact that journalism is a monopoly. Actual competition among the "competitors" in the news business would implode any and all such claims. The very fact that you take no exception at all to my use of the singular number in my grammar is instructive. If the individual faces of journalism did not stem from a single root, would you not expect me to say "jouranalisms are?"
What is the Proper Role of Journalism in a Free Society
2008-02-13 | Mike Ackers