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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.

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….”

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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.”

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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.

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….”

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.

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.

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.”

Brilliant wordsmithing Marc. I believe that there is indeed “Objective Truth,” but even 222 “confirmed sources” won’t necessarily nail it down.