{"id":897,"date":"2007-06-05T12:02:24","date_gmt":"2007-06-05T18:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/index.php\/2007\/06\/05\/ok-seriously-now\/"},"modified":"2014-12-12T14:53:24","modified_gmt":"2014-12-12T20:53:24","slug":"ok-seriously-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=897","title":{"rendered":"OK, Seriously, Now…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…Eric Black, one of the Twin Cities’ most respected reporters, is apparently joining the Minnesota Monitor<\/a> – a publication underwritten by the “Center for Independent Media”, an organization that used to share office space with George Soros-funded attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”.\u00a0 While we (and for that matter nobody) really knows where their money comes from, appearances count – as does the CIM and MNMon’s silence about the source of their funding.<\/p>\n

But let’s ignore all that for a moment.\u00a0 The MNMon – as a “progressive” news site – subscribes, wittingly or not, to the European model of journalism, where newspapers and other media outlets are honest and up-front about their own intrinsic biases.\u00a0 For example, everyone knows before opening up the paper that the Guardian <\/em>is a hard-left leaning paper, Die Zeit <\/em>and the Sun <\/em>lean left (by European standards), that Frankfurter Allgemeine <\/em>is slightly right of center, and that the Times <\/em>is sympathetic to the Tories.\u00a0 One filters the news on one’s own, fully aware of any potential <\/em>ideological bias that might be operating in the writing or editing process.<\/p>\n

The American system, for over a century, has either rigorously disciplined itself to seek and maintain detachment and tried to abjure points of view or <\/em>proffered an elaborate fiction based on the myth of objectivity to cover deep-seated political biases with a thin veneer of dogmatic legitimacy, depending on your view.\u00a0 Pundits on both sides claim to see, and sometimes strain to advocate, one or the other or some compomise among them.<\/p>\n

Black, in an interview<\/a> on the Hugh Hewitt show last October<\/a>, would seem to have been firmly in the latter camp:<\/p>\n

EB: I don\u2019t believe the way to improve it is to have biased coverage with the biases admitted.<\/p>\n

HH: Well, you\u2019ve just admitted that everyone in the newsroom has bias. Every single person has a bias, right?<\/p>\n

EB: Right. There\u2019s a tension in my mind. I know you don\u2019t think this is reasonable, but I\u2019m trying to frame this in the way it appears to me. The tension in my mind is whether it\u2019s better to have a system in which people are attempting to overcome their biases,<\/em> are striving for some sort of a definition of fairness, which I agree is largely in the eye of the beholder, and very difficult to obtain, and as a result of that strategy, let\u2019s call it a strategy or goal or a norm\u2026as a result of that, our not disclosing their biases, or whether it\u2019s better to just have open bias disclosed, but filtering and coloring everything that comes through<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the interview, Black’s sympathies were clear; better to\u00a0keep all appearance of bias out of the mix. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Question for Eric Black; to the non-“journalist”, you’d seem to have changed your mind.\u00a0 You’ve gone to work for an outlet that discloses its biases – or, to be more accurate, disclaims bias because of an unenforceable, untestable “pledge” while waving its “progressive” flag with promiscuous glee.\u00a0 It’s an outlet where every single one of your “co-workers” has spent a blogging career writing stuff whose bias is a matter of pride (as is my own).\u00a0 With none of them is there the faintest reason to assume any of the sort of “detachment” or “objectivity” to which you seemed to aspire – which, indeed, you held up as the preferred model for journalism when you walked with Hugh.<\/p>\n

So is this a change of heart?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…Eric Black, one of the Twin Cities’ most respected reporters, is apparently joining the Minnesota Monitor – a publication underwritten by the “Center for Independent Media”, an organization that used to share office space with George Soros-funded attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”.\u00a0 While we (and for that matter nobody) really knows where their money […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[326,31,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-alt-media","category-blogs","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=897"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49907,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions\/49907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}