Sometimes the theater really is on fire
Since the first few posts here, we've gone on about the bias of the news media. I've taken the position that we go to great lengths to avoid the appearance of bias, specifically political bias, in our local coverage.
I still believe that. But I wish I had also made this point because it is dead-on accurate. According to Douglas McCollam, a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review, the press has a bias -- a bias against power (via Romenesko.
"Some may still call it liberal, and to the extent that it is suspicious of the status quo, they would be right in a way. But I am advocating admitting to an active suspicion of concentrated financial and political influence and those who stand to benefit from it, not the promotion of any particular ideology, cause, or agenda.
"This stance puts journalists directly in the crosshairs of any ruling cadre, which is just where they should be. It is no coincidence that the two institutions most reliably opposed to entrenched power in the last century -- journalism and the judiciary -- are today under tandem assault. Both institutions have made a habit of raising prickly objections to the will and beliefs of the majority, often on behalf of the despised or disenfranchised. And both institutions have been labeled "elitists" by those who view such interference as antidemocratic or unpatriotic, or at least pretend to."
The war has split the nation apart, and letter writers either argue that the news media is irresponsible for not "exposing" the various ways the administration is going awry or for being simply far left and against the president. Directly to Mr. McCollam's point, last month a writer to this paper called the news media's reporting on the war "an act of treason."
It happens with local power structures, too. We're often criticized by those in power, whether it be Mayor Keith Holliday, Commissioner Skip Alston or High Point leaders who don't like the way we write about the Las Vegas market.
It comes with the turf. We expect the push back when we write stories bigwigs don't like. And they should get used to that sort of coverage, although I'm not holding my breath. My point, though, is that it's not political or personal; it's simply that they are in power, making decisions that affect many, many people. They should be questioned by a skeptical news media and constituency.
McCollam ends his piece with good advice: "From the founding, the American press was meant to be oppositional. There is a reason Thomas Jefferson, no stranger to bad press coverage, said that if forced to choose, he'd rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers. In the aftermath of the Afghan riots, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the microphones at the Pentagon to admonish that, in these dangerous times, the press should be "very careful" about what it said and printed. Of course, the opposite is true. In turbulent times, the press should be more outspoken, not less. Rumsfeld's comment recalls another old legal theory, that freedom of speech does not extend to falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. Journalists should never be false about anything. But for too many in the wake of September 11, 2001, the whole world has become a crowded theater, and the press is too often being told to ignore the gathering smoke. It shouldn't."
Comments (9)
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Interesting.
I do have an unrelated question: what is the status of the redesign of your website? The mockups were rolled out more than a month ago. Any progress? I sure hope we don't end up with what the mock-up looks like.
Thanks!
Posted on July 7, 2005 2:28 PM
It has been interesting and educational in reading and participaing in the online comments about the various letters to the editor. As a result I have a newly found appreciation of professional journalists. If the vicious, cruel, mean, and nasty personal attacks made in the blogs is an indication of what journalists have had to put up with during their careers then all of you are to be commended for staying the course in your career choices.
Posted on July 7, 2005 3:48 PM
Jim, JR is officially on vacation this week and might or might not get back here anytime soon, so I'll give you the best answer I can: I don't know. As reported in the NYT earlier this week, we were scheduled to launch it this coming Monday. I was supposed to attend a meeting today to talk about some issues related to the launch. However, that meeting was postponed, then canceled, because our tech folks were dealing with some urgent server issues. So far, I have heard nothing more from them. I do not know what that might portend for a Monday launch, but our recent history gives me little reason for optimism.
I'll post more over at my own blog when I know it, although there's always the chance that they'll just launch the thing at 3 a.m. some night soon and you'll find out about it before I do. :-)
Posted on July 7, 2005 5:04 PM
Mr. Collins: We appreciate your sympathy.
Speaking strictly for myself, and drawing on my pre-journalism background as a public-relations professional in New York, I would argue that we have brought part of the problem on ourselves by staying silent in the face of objectively inaccurate criticism. We journalists like to say we're not part of the story, but sometimes we become part of it whether we want to be or not, and the ex-flack in me says that when that happens, we need to acknowledge it and act in our own best long-term interests, just as any other affected player would do. Certainly, if we don't, no one else will.
One of the many good things about this whole blog-revolution-type-thing is that we now have more avenues for rebutting and/or refuting such criticism, and I think that when we do it well, our readers respect us more even when they don't necessarily agree with us.
Posted on July 7, 2005 5:10 PM
Jim, Lex is correct, but my guess is that it will be next week. We adopted many of the suggestions we got from readers on the beta site, which has prolonged our wait. However, I fear we may disappoint you with the site's similarity of the beta site.
Tom, Lex is such a deep thinker. Me, I agree with McCallom when he remembers this scene from "All the President's Men:" "When someone suggests that young Woodstein's Watergate reporting, replete with anonymous sources, might lead the paper to ruin, Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee cocks his head and looks down the table, saying: 'Then it's our asses, and we'll all have to go out and work for a living.'"
Posted on July 7, 2005 5:23 PM
Well, there have been moments of bias in the past. But Allen Johnson assures me they won't happen in the future.
See Allen and my dialogue about this on his blog here http://blog.news-record.com/staff/outloud/archives/2005/03/politics_and_gr_1.html
Posted on July 7, 2005 10:44 PM
"The war has split the nation apart"
That's funny. I just drove back from Seattle and I didn't notice any major changes in landscape.
Posted on July 8, 2005 9:22 AM
Well said John. If more editors understood and promulgated this point of view, this country would not be in the mess it's in today.
Posted on July 8, 2005 12:52 PM
Wow, I wish I'd said that.
Posted on July 8, 2005 7:46 PM