Jay Rosen’s PressThink offers a thorough look at the flap over Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing blog for WashingtonPost.com.
Allow me to add my $.02 to Rosen’s excellent report, in an effort to provide some additional perspective to these sorts of things:
I spent about three years, early in career, working as an editorial writer for a GOP-leaning newspaper. In that job, as one might expect, I had regular contact with individuals and think tanks that help craft and disseminate conservative political opinion. (Less with sources on the left.) So I can say, from personal experience, that political conservatives in America years ago declared a private war on objective journalism. As part of that, the right has worked diligently to create an alternate media where information’s value is judged internally by its political utility to the right, rather than by the quality of empirical evidence supporting it.
Yet mainstream journalists remain reticent to acknowledge that fact when reporting on conflicts between the conservatives and the press.
Which isn’t surprising, I suppose. How does the press acknowledge this conflict without implicitly accepting it? And how can the press accept this conflict without abandoning its commitment to reporting on both sides of the ideological spectrum without favor? It’s just a lot easier, intellectually, to pretend the conflict does not exist – to go on believing that the right subscribes to some unspoken covenant that respects the practice of objective journalism and to treat any complaint about a reporter or a story (or a blog) as substantive on the issue of journalistic process, rather than simply being an objection to that process’s result.
But that’s not accurate. Or honest. The political right does not want Americans getting their information from objective journalists, whether they be reporters or columnists. It wants Americans to get their news from agents of the political right. (The left might entertain similar fantasies, but, to date, it has made nowhere near the coordinated effort to make them happen that the right has.) This, among daily newspapers at least, is the great underreported media story of our generation. And the Dan Froomkin flap is merely the latest episode within it.
About Robert Niles
Hi Robert. Great issue you brought here. The battle among politics, objectivity and perspective can leave truth on the bench. Recognizing that is the first step to fixing it (kind of like what CJR Daily tried to do in the 2004 elections).
Any ideas about how to, well, raise the conversation / debate on this topic?
I see this issue covered well in books and on blogs. But it seems nonexistent to me in newspapers on on cable TV news. (I’m speaking of U.S. media, to be clear.)
When speaking privately with current and former newspaper editors and reporters, I sense widespread revulsion at the type of insider-stroking “off the record” journalism practiced most notably at the New York Times and the Washington Post. At times, that method has produced great journalism. And at others, most recently, it has allowed official sources to drive the truth from the paper, mislead the public and to intimidate and silence true whistle-blowers.
Ultimately, everyone in this field has to decide whose side they are on: the readers, their sources or fellow ideologues. Those who choose the readers must live by their decision and work constantly to inform their readers about those news providers who chose otherwise.