In today's New York Times, public editor Daniel Okrent gets religion on the question of whether newspapers should strive after an impossible ideal of "objectivity" that too often deforms their news reporting into "he said"/"she said" neutrality:
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.
...[H]aven'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.
Exactly right. As we show in All the President's Spin, reporters need to consistently go beyond "he said"/"she said" reporting or politicians will take advantage of them with a string of falsehoods and deception. An informed, sophisticated beat reporter with a deep knowledge of a subject like taxes or the federal budget is in the best position to do a serious fact-check. Unfortunately, there are only a few newspapers in America that let them do that in any sort of consistent way right now - probably just the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and (on foreign policy matters) Knight Ridder's Washington bureau.
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