Conor Fredersdorf, writing at the Atlantic, says something I’ve been saying since long before I started this blog; it’s time to ditch the 20th century American notion of “objective” journalism.
He does it in defense of a part-time NPR staffer who was fired for appearing, with a sign, at an “Occupy” rally. To old-school journalists, that’s a big no-no, at least ostensibly; in theory, the ideal was that journalists be above it all – to “report from nowhere”.
Fredersdorf’s idea is familiar to anyone who follows European-style journalism – where reporters, and outlets’, opinions aren’t necessarily no-go territory, but where reporting is fair and accurate and, opinions aside, balanced:
That ought to be the pitch that newspapers and public radio stations make to their audience. It might go something like this: “Yes, the field of journalism attracts more liberals than conservatives, more Occupy Wall Street participants than Tea Party ralliers, more urban dwellers than rural Americans, more college graduates than people without degrees, more Democrats than Republicans, more English majors than math majors, more secular people than religious people — and although we value diversity of thought, experience and world view on our staff, the core of our value proposition is that we’re accurate in our reporting, fair-minded in setting forth arguments and perspectives even when we don’t agree with them, transparent about who we are, attune to our biases and constantly trying to account for them, and insistent that we be judged by our output, not our political or religious or ideological identity, or what we do on weekends. Judge us by our work, and if you challenge it in good faith we’ll engage you.”
Well, that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?
I mean, in theory I’m right there with him – at least for purposes the future of American journnalism.
The problem is, for purposes of describing how jiournalism theoretically works today, every part of the proposition is false. The media – especially in the Twin Cities – does not value diversity in the newsroom. There is no honesty about bias – when Nick Coleman can do a program on an Air America affiliate but yet still get praised as an “old-school gumshoe reporter”, where the Minnesota Poll and the Humphrey Institute polls can traffic in decades of inaccuracy whose pro-DFL bias is only thinly plausibly deniable, what’s the point?
And if Fredersdorf wants the media to be judged by its output – well, there’s a problem there, too. We’re talking about a media that worked overtime to examine (at best) and demonize the Tea Party, while bearing the “Occupy” movement along with gauzy soft focus. They go over conservatives’ backgrounds with fine-toothed combs (except as re checking facts and providing sources), but let Barack Obama skate to the White House without a peep about his inexperience and background. And they fabricated one very big story about George W. Bush.
And since Fredersdoff brought it up – why, yes – I’d love to bring my “good faith” challenges to the regional media over the way they tortured the facts for a full week in the Evanovich shooting story to support a “gotta be careful about those gun owners!” narrative. Or on how Rochelle Olson reported, back in 2006, on Alan Fine’s “domestic abuse” arrest, taking care to excise every fact from her “output” that would have diverted from the narrative that he, Keth Ellison’s challenger, had a blotted record.
Who in the Twin Cities media would like to start “engaging” with “good faith challenges”? Or is this something you’ll all just fob off on your ombudspeople for a careful whitewashing?
It may seem like a good idea to avoid the “perception of bias” by insisting that media employees hide who they are from the audience. Perhaps it was once even tenable. It no longer is. To build your credibility on viewlessness is to concede, every time an employee of yours is shown to be a sentient, opinionated person, that your credibility has taken a hit. To tout and enforce your viewlessness is to hold your own reputation hostage to reality; it makes your credibility, the most valuable thing you have, vulnerable to every staffer’s Tweet, or incriminating Facebook photograph, or inane James O’Keefe hidden video sting operation. She claims to be neutral, but look, while out at a dinner with friends we caught her on camera saying that she thinks Obama is a better president than was Bush. See! She was hiding her liberal views from us all along!
Who is even fooled at this point?
Nobody who actually reads the Twin Cities media, to name one.
The American public understands who makes up the press corps, or more likely, has an exaggerated idea of how liberal it is precisely because the lack of transparency and pose of viewlessness seems conspiratorial.
That, and the fact that the breaches in “viewlessness” always, inevitably,l every single time, break to the left.
Is any reader of this article shocked or even mildly surprised that a Brooklyn-based freelance Web journalist working part time at a New York City public radio station held up a cardboard sign during an Occupy Wall Street protest? If that totally banal and predictable event is the thing that gets you upset as a journalistic manager, if you think that it is the threat to your program’s credibility, you misunderstand the present media landscape.
And there Fredersdorff has a point. The problem is a lot bigger than some NPR web prole carrying a sign at an “Occupy” rally.
But Fredersdorff has what I think is a deeply naive faith that the current mainstream media has the integrity to “engage” with anyone but itself.
Unless you know something about certain other European countries that I don’t know, the MSM in the Euro countries I do know does the very same Objective Journalism pose. It works particularly well when certain aspects of news items or even entire items are, um, neglected – as here.
Modern day journalism lives high on that objectivity BS to cover their perfidy. Regardless of the continent.
” The American public understands who makes up the press corps, or more likely, has an exaggerated idea of how liberal it is precisely”
Oh, I don’t the American public has an exaggerated idea of how liberal the press corps is. The Opposite is true. The liberal bias of the mainstream press is institutionalized, and it was institutionalized deliberately.
I love when your colleague Hugh Hewitt opens up an interview with a political reporter who has come on the show to hump a book by asking the reporter/guest who they voted for in the last election. The reaction is generally one of disbelief that the question was even asked or that the reporter/guest is so apolotical, why, they don’t even vote! I just heard the writer of a book on the ten letters President Obama reads each day say this on the Ingraham Show last week.
I wish we could go back to a time when you had two (or more) newspapers in every town of more than 100,000 people with one reporting from a Republican/Conservative view and the other from the Democrat(ic)/Liberal view. Since nearly all news reporting today comes from the latter view, the newspaper (and their broadcast cousins) have no check on them where a competiting outlet checks the Liberal reporting by presenting a different view from the other or another side of the story.
If it weren’t for the fact that Shot in the Dark exists, I might have believed Lori Sturdevant bull***t story about some of the redistricting groups (she favored) were non-partisan. When we cancelled the Strib it wasn’t because we were ranting right wingers who tired of the same left wing nonsense both in reportage and from the editorial page in issue after issue; it was that the Strib no longer had any credibility as a provider of news.
The Herman Cain story is a perfect example – unnamed sources and not corroborated by anyone willing to go on the record. As I read elsewhere on the internet earlier – would these four reporters (and their editors, managers, etc) have rolled with a story like this on a Democratic candidate? The answer from the John (Silky Pony) Edwards affair tells us no, they would not have.
“But Fredersdorff has what I think is a deeply naive faith. . . ”
Well, he is like, what, 22-years-old?
When I want information I don’t turn to Twin Cities media. The only time I’ll get anything close to an accurate story from local media is the snow depth of yesterday’s blizzard. I quit watching and reading the locals 20 years ago. They could learn a lot from me – if they would ask. I have a degree in English/Journalism and know – in detail – why they’re hemorrhaging readers/viewers. Of course, they DON’T want to know the truth because it would destroy their narrative.
Hugh Hewitt visits Columbia School of Journalism and defines the problem with mainstream journalism much better than Fredersdorff:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/619njpsr.asp
CSJ was founded by Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer made it quite clear that he believed that journalism had a first-order duty to perform a progressive function. Journalism was to promote the interests of the People, as defined by journalists with, of course, no oversight.
Hell, at least they used to be responsible to their advertisers and customers. These days they’d rather be responsible to the Ministry of Truth.
Perfect example, about 2 weeks apart (or at least fairly close):
A) A radical anti-abortionist went into a Kansas church and murdered an abortion doctor
B) A radical pro-choicer walked up to a guy holding a pro-life sign, and murdered him, saying he can’t stand pro-life people.
Want to do a story count in the Star Tribune to see the difference in stories that ran on these two almost identical events, that happened at almost the same time.
Remember Ezra Klein (BA, Political Science, UCLA, 2005) and his explanation of why he made Journolist a leftist-only party?
He closed the membership of Journolist to liberals only because he did not want a “debating society”.
Klein formed Journolist when he was 23 years old. Every political thought he had at the age of 23 he considered not open to debate. He had no interest at all in engaging dialog with journalists on the right. He wanted a closed-circuit conversation where liberals, many ostensibly “unbiased” reporters, could shape their stories, and he saw no problem with that at all.
One of the two rules he set for Journolist was “no conservatives”.
The sad thing with Klein’s JounOlist is, even if he had opened the membership to those on the right, the overall pool of potential members would not have expanded by a significant amount.
Mark Levin affectionately calls him “Fredersdork”