Press Purification Rituals
The public self-expurgation that the New York Times is going through on the Judith Miller episode makes some of the most compelling current reading. Say what you will about the Times, few news organizations (make that few institutions of any sort) dare to be so openly self-critical.
Times ombudsman Byron Calame’s long-awaited take on the Miller affair leaves little wriggle room when it comes to conclusions. He directly challenges publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s notion that Miller should return to the paper with certain limitations: “It seems to me that whatever the limits put on her, the problems facing her inside and outside the newsroom will make it difficult for her to return to the paper as a reporter.”
Rim shot. MoDo’s latest column was equaly frank and brutal. Maureen could have saved herself 750 words and boiled the whole riff down to one thrifty sentence. Something like: “Judy’s an imperious, lying bitch.” And now, we learn from Newsweek what we already surmised, that a pack of Times’ reporters are now out for Miller’s blood (hope they like iced drinks).
But it was last Friday’s statement from Times editor Bill Keller that is the most important of these documents. As an editor’s confession, it’s remarkably straightforward while still falling short of being absolutely frank. Keller claims to have second thoughts about how “entangled” Miller was with her Plamegate source Scooter Libby. And Keller knows that we know that he came into his chair after Miller’s WMD reporting turned out to be dead wrong. But he still gives us no plausible explanation as to why he allowed Miller to continue to run amok – to continue to report in these same areas where she had already been shown to have, shall we say, Zero Credibility.
If Keller won’t explain, let me take a crack at it. Get out your notepad, Bill.
American newspapers are hostage to their obsolete and unique model of “balanced, objective journalism”—something that press critic Jay Rosen bemoans as “the contraption.”
This manufactured model strips American reporters, editors and their newspapers of the tools they need to navigate and explain a very complicated world, as my pal Tim Porter expains in the same linked posting above.
So when a minor offense to this model is detected, say something like Jayson Blair, the “we’re shocked, just shocked” response is immediate, draconian and absolute. Like dogmatic medieval priests conducting an exorcism, the accused plagiarist or concocter of facts is mercilessly purged and erased from history.
Look no further than events last week at the third tier daily Bakersfield Californian, where some young reporter got caught making up (a rather insignificant) story. She was immediately fired (which was arguably but not necessarily the right solution). Then the editors splashed the news on the front page of the paper, as if the readers could really give a shit about such inside baseball. But highlighting and overplaying such a mundane story has got nothing to do with the readers. Rather it’s a bizarre sort of purification ritual that editorial management publicly performs, mostly to convince itself that the priesthood will continue untarnished; that there is — really there is, really, really– such a thing as a single, balanced Truth; and that as long as you have two confirmed sources, you’ve got it nailed and can wash your hands.
Which brings us to Judy Miller and the big, whopper lies that are told everyday by the media — the towering variety that dwarf the fudgings of the gal at the Californian. I mean, didn’t Judy have all kinds of confirmed, if anonymous, sources for her fraudulent WMD reporting? And not just run-of-the-mill sources—but the highest placed, government-certified type?
Maybe her editors should have checked them out better or maybe not. But, in general, the Times and all other American newspapers are usually quite comfortable with the sort of “reporting” done by Miller. It fits perfectly into “the contraption” model. Give us a story thesis, and a couple of quotes from trusty (or rusty) sources to back up the thesis and presto! The reporter isn’t “allowed” to make definitive judgements, or to share his or her expertise with the public to dissemble political theater.
Oh Heaven Forbid! Instead, the reporter is to remain non-partisan and objective and just give us some irrefutable truth. In reality, of course, most reporters are partisan. Or better said, they do have judgements of their own (One would certainly hope so!) What they do is simply, and cynically, choose which sources they wish to quote to support their own view and then pass that off as supported fact. Judy Miller supported the drive toward war in Iraq; she found the “sources” to endorse her view. The Times published her regulation-cut reporting and didn’t as much as blink.
In some utopian world of better journalism, Washington reporters would be freer to tell us what’s really happening instead of being glorified stenographers to (good or bad faith) official sources. In the end, Bill Keller told us in the memo what Miller and the Times should have told us at the onset i.e. what Miller was hearing was part of a strategic, political war by the White House against its real and perceived opponents on the war in Iraq, including its own CIA. It was not, conversely, credible information that should have been reproduced and amplified by America’s most influential newspaper.
OK, this time Judy Miller got caught and she richly deserves the current excoriation. But how many other Millers are there out there, churning out everyday a river of stories based on official sources that are little more than partisan spin? These wholesale liars will continue to advance and rise in the profession and be celebrated with awards and banquets. Meanwhile, the little fibbers like that troubled young reporter in Bakersfield will be burned at the stake, her ashes scattered and forgotten in the wind.
October 23rd, 2005 at 6:48 pm
Relevant to MoDo’s column, I mentioned on my blog that perhaps Ms. Dowd should have ripped her a new one when she (Miller) said “I think I should be sitting in the Times seat.”
The other reporters kind of reminds me of what happened at a job once. An attorney I worked with left the firm for another and the unit in which he worked had a party upon his leaving – after he left. I imagine that when Judy is told to leave, there’ll be a similar party.
October 23rd, 2005 at 6:52 pm
Randy… hope Im on the A List for that one!
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:23 pm
Shouldn’t objectivity be the goal? The lack of objectivity talk reminds me of the postmodernist jibber jabber on campus that denies the existence of truth. Pragmatism is one thing, but overtly partisan reporting is not the solution. One characteristic I find in all partisan journalism is ideological suffocation. Read Z magazine or the American Spectator or the Revolutionary Worker. We certainly do not want the NYT or the LA Times going down that road.
If the LA Times reporters who exposed the King Drew problems had strident ideological habituation, they might have written something that could be called “Maxine Watters Approved†and would NOT have been the truth. Likewise some of the more recent evidence of Villaraigosa cronyism – like appointing some ACLU guy to the head of a board on regional homelessness – is not getting reported by many of the left leaning types in LA (I guess homelessness is not that important to Villaraigosa, that is unless he can get a mention by Steve Lopez).
As Hitch said in Why Orwell Matters, “objectivity though in practice as unattainable as infinity, is useful in the same way, at least from a fixed point of theoretical reference.â€
Judith Miller is the result of a total lack of objectivity…
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:32 pm
I seem to recall that in Gay Talese’s book on the TIMES there was an incident in which some junior put in phony HS football scores in the agate section of the Sports pages. He was promptly fired when discovered. So the ritual puriification goes way back. But Judy is different. I imagine that her connections go a long way to explain why. When your’re married to Jason Epstein and have a special relationship to Pinch then a certain immunity will come your way. But there are so many “power Couples” in DC and New York that one really has to cast a jaundiced eye. And then there is the pantomime over this story by the likes of Tim Russert who asks questions on MEET THE PRESS that he has to know the answer to if various journalistic stories are to be believed. But does he tell us? I guess that is not news.
Look I don’t know the answer. Maybe the blogisphere with its return to the phampletering journalism of the 19th century that was opinionated, libelous, vile, and so engrossing that the participation of the eligible electorate was far higher than today. Maybe there is a limit to “objective” journalism. Maybe we should wear our biases on our sleve like the European Press. Everyone in Britain knows that when they read the TELEGRAPH they are getting the Tory view and when they read the GUARDIAN its skewed to Labour. Somehow I find those papers better written and edited and, often, more informative than their US counterparts.
But I don’t teach at a J School so I really think I’ll pass the buck to the people who do. I think you have yor work cut out because the profession is in trouble and it won’t be easily corrected.
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:45 pm
“a pack of Times’ reporters are now out for Miller’s blood (hope they like iced drinks).”
Cold…
October 23rd, 2005 at 9:15 pm
Eric Alterman makes precisely this point in his book Sound and Fury. I read it a long long time ago, but I remember being impressed with this point, and with the discovery that this whole objectivity bag was not how it always was.
I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to note that bias on topics is inevitable when forced to report representatives from each “side” without a touch of analysis or contextualizing. So that, for example, the evolution controversy is reported with a quote from Richard Dawkins on one side, and then Mr. Wingnut Intelligent Design on the other side, and the topic has been “covered.” The elevation of shrill or marginal voices into the realm of legitimate opinion or evidence is an inevitable result of this method. (Or my favorite example: The constant harping by the Republicans over union money in campaigns, which is accepted as fact, when this is, in volume, but a dribble on the bib compared to the Niagara of corporate money in the system. A little context here would shut that laughable line down.)
Josh: Objectivity should give way to fairness. This is admittedly murkier, but I think a better standard. If reporters were bound to give a fair portrait, then the above examples I cite couldn’t be reported with a straight face. What we lose in objective reporting we might gain in accurate reporting.
October 23rd, 2005 at 10:07 pm
It’s all been quite fascinating, ironic and deeply enraging—perhaps particularly for those of us who deal with the issue of journalistic ethics as our daily dancing partner— to see Miller’s colleagues finally, belatedly, calling the woman’s actions for what they are. This may not be rational, and maybe it’s a girl thang—and even though she’s….oh….two years late—yet, I found Maureen Doud’s Saturday column particularly satisfying:
*************************************”…Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times’ seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official’s background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.
“At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, ‘I think I should be sitting in the Times seat.’
“It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch….â€
*************************************A perfectly emblematic illustration of Judy’s blind and reckless ambition.
And then: “…Judy admitted in the story that she ‘got it totally wrong’ about WMD “If your sources are wrong,” she said, ‘you are wrong’ But investigative reporting is not stenography….â€
Well, yes. That does sum it up quite nicely.
And for those who haven’t read the piece, here’s how she ends it:
“ Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover “the same thing I’ve always covered – threats to our country.” If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.â€
There’s much more to this story, of course, one possible thread being the report that Fitzgerald—at least at some point— has extended a few exploratory fingers into the AIPAC scandal, where some have suggested that Judy was the unnamed woman….
For now, we wait for the next chapter.
PS: I hate not having a preview functuib, Marc. Any way to fix that within the new snazzy site?
October 23rd, 2005 at 10:10 pm
I believe I just aptly demonstrated with the above comment why I’d personally prefer to have a preview….um…. “functuib.”
October 23rd, 2005 at 10:45 pm
I think that the best distinction to make in doing journalism is truth and untruth, rather than objectivity and subjectivity–I am still old fashioned enough to believe that seeking the truth is the calling of journalists. The truth is not always unambiguous, of course, and not always knowable. Conventional journalistic “objectivity” is usually used to mask the truth, by watering it down with “balance.” This is why the Times series on MLK Hospital was so good, there was little or no watering down or attempts at false balance. Judy Miller’s reporting lacked objectivity, balance, and truth.
And yes, Marc, please give us a preview function so we can think twice about the silly things we say here!
October 23rd, 2005 at 10:45 pm
Great Marc, Judith Miller sucks, we can’t believe her, but we sure can believe her editor. Oh the NYT, they’d never deliberately mislead this country to war, just ask Hitchens.
October 23rd, 2005 at 11:01 pm
An article in today’s New York Times says that Republicans are already discussing how to spin possible indictments in the Valerie Plame affair later this week. The following excerpt is particularly telling:
“But allies of the White House have quietly been circulating talking points in recent days among Republicans sympathetic to the administration, seeking to help them make the case that bringing charges like perjury mean the prosecutor does not have a strong case, one Republican with close ties to the White House said Sunday. Other people sympathetic to Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said that indicting them would amount to criminalizing politics and that Mr. Fitzgerald did not understand how Washington works”
I was one of those who opposed the so-called “Names of Agents” bill when it was passed in 1982, on the grounds that it prevented exposure of CIA misdeeds abroad–which at that time at least were manifest. However, if outing CIA agents to get back at their husbands who are challenging Bush administration justifications for a war are just “politics,” what does this say about the regard that the people who are playing politics have for their country? This is an extraordinary admission that they have none at all.
October 23rd, 2005 at 11:45 pm
UPDATE ON COMMENTS AND BLOG DESIGN:
Comments preview is something that might happen a few weeks out from now.
In the meantime… please check out our handy RSS feeds for both posts and comments… upper left hand side of the blog.
Still working on the left side bat getting chopped off.
expanded and enhanced searchable archives available on “archives” button on top banner.
we’re getting there/.
October 24th, 2005 at 1:51 am
Marc:
Brilliant wordsmithing Marc. I believe that there is indeed “Objective Truth,” but even 222 “confirmed sources” won’t necessarily nail it down.
October 24th, 2005 at 10:12 am
Dan O writes:
“I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to note that bias on topics is inevitable when forced to report representatives from each “side†without a touch of analysis or contextualizing. So that, for example, the evolution controversy is reported with a quote from Richard Dawkins on one side, and then Mr. Wingnut Intelligent Design on the other side, and the topic has been “covered.†The elevation of shrill or marginal voices into the realm of legitimate opinion or evidence is an inevitable result of this method.”
While I believe there is a bootstrapping effect here, the fact is, we wouldn’t have a public debate on ID were it not for some prior “elevation” on the part of ID advocates. A story on this controversy is not going to be an attempt to establish the truth of the matter about evolution, but rather about the controversy itself. Dawkins has made a career of explaining how evolution works, some other people are starting to make careers on promoting ID. But how did those others even reach the point where their agenda was noteworthy? It’s said that all politics is local, and that’s where it starts: with school boards that are a little gun-shy about teaching evolution at all, or even frankly biased against teaching it. If recent polls are any indication, most Americans believe that some Supreme Being has had at least a hand in evolution, or believe in Genesis, period. That tendency long predates the ID controversy. It’s national because there are a lot of localities involved.
There is no use in pretending that there is some single institution in a healthy democracy that is incorruptible. That includes the press. It even includes the people. An underlying premise in the overall architecture is that ambition should be pitted against ambition, that a variety of institutions will vie for power and influence, and that, ultimately, the one that relies on “the truth will out” as a guiding principle will set democracy straight.
The truth is a long-run strategy, though. The people have to be ready to hear it. Watergate went somewhat underground as a story when Nixon and Kissinger came back from China, triumphant, and were Time Magazine’s “Men of the Year.” Kay Graham didn’t want to go up against such a popular administration at that point.
If the press is part of governing a democracy, and the people get the government they deserve, even the press is not exempt from the bare survival imperative of dishing up popular just desserts, even if it’s the Hostess Twinkie of news. I’m reminded of the old joke (based on a true story, I don’t doubt) about a VP of sales for a pet food company reporting on dismal market reception of a new brand of dog food. The marketing department protested that the commercials were effective, the packaging was attractive, the nutritional balance was scientifically formulated and state-of-the-art. The VP was left to fall back on an uncomfortable truth: “Yes, but … dogs don’t like it.”
NYT’s Keller, shilly-shallying about whether Judith Miller might be too damaged to return to the journalistic fold at his great paper, is essentially engaged in long-term marketing strategy for his brand. Miller did, after all, do some jail time, ostensibly for the principle of source protection. She is, after all, a reporter, and press freedom is sacrosanct. Protecting sources inside the government is not a right to be surrendered lightly — it may help provide nourishing (if none too tasty) dog food at some future time when there’s nothing else to be offered that we dogs will accept. Like anything rewarding, government source protection carries risks, and sometimes the risks are big, as they are now for the NYT. So of course, Keller bides his time, he equivocates, because the time isn’t quite ripe for going full-bore after this administration (if that time ever comes), and to do so now would be to surrender “balance” at what might be a great long-run cost. Far better to engage in “balanced reporting” on what some veterans of the the Bush Sr. administration are now willing to say about the Dubya team. It’ll do for now, and if we see no special prosecutor indictments, or just this Scooter guy falling on his sword, the NYT will be safe to fight another day, with the defense that they were pretty good stenographers through the whole thing.
October 24th, 2005 at 12:00 pm
It seems to me, Marc, that Judy missed the story not because of any widespread journalistic blind spots, but because she allowed herself to follow a government script without questioning the narrative. Michael Balter rightly points out, “Judy Miller’s reporting lacked objectivity, balance, and truth.†I don’t see how the he said/she said reporting undermined her work; had she written giving her best judgments her articles would still read like a summary of neocon talking points. As an outsider, I see the merit in your preferred mode of journalism. But I don’t see how it would have helped anybody in dealing with Judy Miller.
October 24th, 2005 at 2:57 pm
Marc hits the nail on the head. (As does big J-brain, Jay Rosen.) The “O word” has outlived any usefulness to journalism and should be retired.
Objectivity once meant fact-based reporting – using objects – in a storytelling style intended to rise above spin. While regular folks may believe it to still have this meaning, it’s become just another cynical ruse in the media business. Managers and professionals hide behind it to avoid the riskier assignment of reporting the truth. And spinners deploy it as a false standard to – facts be damned – successfully tilt coverage in their direction.
The “O word” is now bogus buzz and a waste product of today’s corporate newsroom, where “news product†is to news, as “Velveeta†is to cheese. Despite being accurate and objective, there is nothing fact-based or truthful about “he said, she said†accounts of dueling spin.
When reporters are prohibited from nailing down simple truths (no matter how obvious these truths may be from their informed perspective) the results ain’t real cheese. This “cheese food†professionalism – which once-upon-a-time meant rising above personal bias to let the facts fall where they may – has become a key ingredient for brain-dead stenography to power.
I say let’s embed reporters back in their own reporting.
When its good journalism, we’ll see developed narratives of fact, varied sourcing and appropriate fairness to differing views. And when its bad J, the story will be clouded by spin, rhetoric and narrow preconceptions. We’re adults. We’ll get to pick what we prefer. The important thing is what won’t be missing: the informed perspective of people who serve us on the front lines of the fight to figure out what the hell’s going on.
October 24th, 2005 at 4:26 pm
You can nail down truth with less than five sources. Certainly a trending direction can be determined as all testimony and and factual evidence doesn’t carry the same weight. Being fair doesn’t mean elevating fallacial ideas and beliefs higher than they can fly on their own merit. Journalists have to guard against this.
October 24th, 2005 at 4:47 pm
Ready to pack off to the pub to suck down a couple Bloody Judies. Did anyone see her on CSpan at a journalist’s convention in Las Vegas. She was promoted in the workshop (on the need for a federal shield law) as the star. She got a pretty chilly reception, I thought, but most of the very large audience (and her co-presenters) pretty much sat on their hands.
Most of what she said was of course ultra-self-serving, and she dodged any substantive question by asserting the “continuing investigation” objection. Interestingly, she seems to be arguing that no one could violate any statute preventing disclosure of a state secret until a court had ruled that state secret was protected by the statute. Clearly she has been hanging around with too many 2nd year associates during and after her incarceration.
She has a pretty decent on-stage personality, and was more likable than I would have expected. Still, she seemed to be expecting more adulation than she got, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be her stuffed bear when she got back to the suite.
She seemed to get a real charge with prefacing all her responses with, “well, when I was in jail, it occurred to me…” or “during my 85 days in jail….”
October 24th, 2005 at 6:39 pm
The side bar is fixed, the link to my blog is good, the writing is superior, the blog is damn near perfect… Now, if you were only a little more conservative….
October 24th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
I hope everyone saw Juan Cole’s comments today that bear on this topic. It is an interesting argument and deserves some attention. For those who haven’t Cole argues that Rupert Murdoch, thru the medium of FOX NEWS, mau maued the TIMES and others by criticicising the paper as ultr-liberal and Un-American for not backing Bush 100%. With the atmosphere at the time the paper was intimidated and did not properly supervise Judy Miller for fear of seeming against the “War on Terror.” What do you think. Read the piece.
October 24th, 2005 at 8:33 pm
I too read Juan Cole’s comments about the cowing of the NYT by Rupert Murdoch. However, rather than making the Times look like a victim of ruthless bullying, in my mind, the paper looks rather pathetic. I’d rather see a giant on the side of truth than the whimpering coward that Cole seems to paint.
October 24th, 2005 at 9:04 pm
A giant on the side of truth? They got the story wrong; in this instance with Miller’s help they lost sight of the truth.
October 24th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
Predictions: Judy Miller will be named an editor at one of the new New Times newspapers. Bill Keller will become a covert agent in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and crack cocaine in Harlem. The New York Times will become the first newspaper in America to be classifed by the Library of Congress as a daily work of fiction. Jayson Blair will return as editor.
October 24th, 2005 at 10:48 pm
The Juan Cole post is interesting, but I think it’s one piece of a much larger puzzle . The 2004 New York Magazine story by Franklin Foer on Miller has, in the end, a broader and more instructive view.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html
Here are some representative ‘graphs:
“Before September 11, Miller, with her anxieties about anthrax attacks, could seem like Chicken Little; afterward, she seemed more liked Cassandra, the only one who’d been right. And this fact gave her tremendous power at the paper. Eight months before the attacks, she published a piece documenting Al Qaeda’s WMD ambitions—part of a series that later earned her (along with several colleagues) a Pulitzer. Germs, a book about bioterrorism co-written with two Times colleagues, appeared less than a month after the attacks and soon hit the best-seller list. She began making regular appearances on CNN and PBS, becoming a public face of the paper—a celebrity that grimly solidified when she received a hoax letter at her desk containing a white, powdery substance resembling anthrax.
What’s more, she had spent several decades acquiring access to Washington’s Middle East experts, some of whom suddenly wielded tremendous influence in the Bush administration. Miller’s many doubters at the Times were effectively silenced. She had emerged as one of the paper’s biggest stars, with the kind of “competitive metabolism†that new editor Howell Raines—he’d taken over from Joseph Lelyveld the week before 9/11—made into a crusade. According to a friend of Raines’s, as well as one of Miller’s colleagues at the paper, the editor pulled her aside after the attacks. “Go win a Pulitzer,†he told her.
“For the next two years, she supplied the paper with a string of grim exclusives. There was the defector who described Saddam Hussein’s recent renovation of storage facilities for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There was her report that a Russian virologist might have handed the regime a particularly virulent strain of smallpox. To protect themselves against VX and sarin, she further reported, the Iraqis had greatly increased the importation of an antidote to these agents. And, most memorably, she co-wrote a piece in which administration officials suggested that Iraq had attempted to import aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons. Vice-President Dick Cheney trumpeted the story on Meet the Press, closing the circle. Of course, each of the stories contained important caveats. But together they painted a horrifying picture. There was just one problem with them: The vast majority of these blockbusters turned out to be wrong….”
AND
” In February, on the public-radio show “The Connection,†she said, “My job was not to collect information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency; my job was to tell readers of the New York Times, as best as I could figure out, what people inside the governments, who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have in the area of weapons of mass destruction. ”
“….While Miller might not have intended to march in lockstep with these hawks, she was caught up in an almost irresistible cycle. Because she kept printing the neocon party line, the neocons kept coming to her with huge stories and great quotes, constantly expanding her access….”
AND
“…Raines had a clear reason to defend Miller. By early 2002, she had become one of the paper’s most valuable assets. The Times was being soundly challenged by the Washington Post in its coverage of the war on terror. He’d been especially irked by the attention that his rival garnered with Bob Woodward’s meaty reporting from inside the CIA and FBI throughout the fall and winter, tracing preparations for war in Afghanistan and early investigations into 9/11. For a man who made it his mission to raise the paper’s “competitive metabolism†and expressed his thoughts in sports metaphors, the defeat was especially painful. Judith Miller was the strongest card he had to play. No other reporter had managed to win the trust of the administration hawks and could so consistently deliver Post-beating scoops….”
********
There’s also some material that backs up what Juan Cole has said, although the source of the Times worry, in the NY Mag piece, is less Fox than it is conservative print outlets like Bill Krystol in the Weekly Standard. In any case, the criticism evidently got to the Times and Raines, who wanted to prove that he could “do a story straight”…and began bending over backwards to accommodate the Bush administration’s views….
“A former editor says, “In the months before the war, Raines consistently objected to articles that questioned the administration’s claims about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda and September 11 while never raising a doubt about Miller’s more dubiously sourced pieces about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.â€
***********
If you haven’t, I recommend reading the whole thing. In light of this past week’s sturm und drang at the NYT, it feels new all over again.
October 25th, 2005 at 9:23 am
Josh, how do you reconcile your view of the average protestor being a crazed hippie support of Kim Sung Il and your call for objectivity?
October 25th, 2005 at 10:58 pm
Marc,
I am just a guy on a blog and thankfully my opinion does not matter. But I don’t think the average protester is a crazed Kim Sung Il supporter (I read somewhere that way back in the day Robert Scheer was a fan of the man. Not sure if it is true). But the leaders and loudest attendants are pretty crazy. You have observed this as well.
You and Mr. Schubb were victims of some rather un-objective reporting during the Pacifica crisis. Not just on Democracy Now, also in the Nation, Progressive, and many other “progressive†mags. Hell, I even think I remember Time writing a story defending Amy Goodman. Nobody really gave your side was given much of a voice (maybe in the Weekly). Many “professionals” bought into the “corporatization” of Pacifica and thus all of your hard work was wasted. That didn’t seem fair did it?
That awful story in the LA Times about the poor family in the 3 million dollar home was rather un-objective as well. If the author looked at the “plight” of those people objectively, he might not have written the story.
Was Judy Miller a liar or was she a true believer? It seems to be a very fine line.
The pool of trustworthy and professional journalists is pretty damn small these days. Doing away with objectivity is like doing away with “regulation.” I do not trust corporations and I do not trust many journalists. I tend to read the honest ones.
Objectivity is impossible, but serious consideration of it might lessen ideologically fueled reporting on both sides. Otherwise, Amy Goodman and the 700 Club are the future. I would take the NYT (even with Judith Miller) over that any day of the week.
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