Walter Pincus of the Post: Our Neutered Newsrooms are a Poor Example to the Rest of the World

[marmar]

from HuffPost:


Jay Rosen
Walter Pincus of the Post: Our Neutered Newsrooms are a Poor Example to the Rest of the World
Posted March 17, 2008 | 10:57 PM (EST)



It is rare that a single article advances American press think. In fact, it is rare for American press think to advance at all, which is one of the reasons our press is so vexed these days. Take this column by Clark Hoyt, the New York Times public editor. Goes like this:

Many readers have complained to me that the Times is not "shooting down the middle" in its coverage of the 2008 campaign. But I've been monitoring and grading the coverage myself, and I have a surprise for some of you. "The Times has not been systematically biased in its news coverage, even if it has occasionally given ammunition to those who claim otherwise."

Ta-da... An unbiased press! Now I do not doubt his word. Clark wouldn't cook the books. But this is a conversation that's savagely stuck, gamed not to go anywhere -- for all sides. Professional journalists do not improve the situation when they double down on their neutrality and present objectivity as a truth claim about their own work. It is this kind of claim that compels people to furnish -- furiously -- more chapter and verse in the very bad and very long book of media bias. Which then causes Hoyt to speak lines like, "Bias is a tricky thing to measure, because we all bring our biases to the task."

The only exit from this system is for people in the press to start recognizing: there is a politics to what they do. They have to get that part right. And they have to be more transparent about it.

But this recognition is circuit-frying for the press we inherited from the Watergate era, and from the long arc of professionalization before that. For it means that political argument isn't really "separate" from news at all, even though the priesthood wants it to be, and still preaches that. There's a reason Daniel Okrent considered his most important column as public editor this one. (Is the New York Times a liberal newspaper? "Of course it is," he said -- on social issues at least. It reflects the city where it is made.)

The informed display of political conviction

Josh Marshall's TPM Media operation is a new media newsroom that does political reporting in the same space as the big providers. Marshall believes in accountability journalism, sticking with stories, digging into public records for information, getting to the bottom of things, verifying what you think you know, correcting the record when you get it wrong.

TPM marries these traditional virtues to open expressions of outrage, incredulity marking certain political figures as ridiculous or beyond the pale, and the informed display of political conviction. These make it obvious to any reader of Talking Points Memo that Marshall is a liberal Democrat skeptical of the Bush agenda, though not a dogmatic one. His is the transparency route to trust and success in political journalism. A key crossing point came last month when Marshall and company won a George K. Polk Award for excellence in reporting on the legal system. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-rosen/walter-pincus-of-the-p_b_92019.html

[Jackpine Radical]

1. One major problem--among a veritable sea of problems--is that the answers

you get are no better than the questions you ask. If you choose to investigate trivial things, you will discover trivial facts. And our mass media are nothing if not trivial.