Under the heading of Media Bias Watch, Mr. Sullivan directs my attention to Alan Greenblatt's "Journalists shouldn't be cheerleaders" in the St. Petersburg Times. Apparently Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism invited Norman Mailer (among others) to speak at a conference, and Mr. Mailer's anti-Bush rhetoric provoked sustained and loud applause from the audience of "freelance writers and editors and reporters from nearly every major paper in the country."
Conference attendee Jack Hart, managing editor of the Portland Oregonian, said that "These people don't seem to understand what their role in society is." Greenblatt writes,
Increasingly, it's difficult for the average American to tell supposedly objective or balanced mainstream reports from the vast army of opinion mongers.
From this we can gather that Hart and Greenblatt believe that the journalist's role in society is to present objective facts, and to accomplish the delivery of this information with transparent integrity, so that the average American can trust that what the media delivers is, in fact, fair and balanced.
To me, that's a fantasy. And a harmful one, at that.
The idea of an "objective reporter" is a fiction that was much easier to maintain before the information pipelines got fast and fat. Take, for example, the recent flap over CBS getting suckered--perhaps willfully--by forged documents. If this had happened in the pre-Internet era, nobody would heard much about the debunking of the documents by experts like Philip Bouffard or Joseph Newcomer, simply because the information channels were narrow and well-guarded. The rumors of forgery would have remained rumors, as far as the general public was concerned. CBS would never have been forced to present its own experts, because its reporting would have been sufficient. The network would have remained well-protected by the elven cloak of Woodward and Bernstein--standard equipment issued to all post-Watergate journalists--with Papa Cronkite giving the whole thing an air of genial respectability.
That's the problem with positing the reporter as impartial arbiter of fact. It's akin to an informal logical fallacy: argumentum ad verecundiam, or appeal to authority. Mr. Hart would have us regard the position of Journalist as somehow sacrosanct, and is upset that the current crop of reporters and editors is betraying that trust. Mr. Greenblatt believes that the problem is that reporters now "willingly reveal their political leanings at a public forum," as though the Journalist who does not demonstrate his partisanship in public is somehow better able to avoid bias in reporting. In both cases, the idea is that journalists are supposed to function as information gatekeepers: they should have expertise in identifying not only which piece of information is important, but in mapping each piece of information to a given position, in such a way that all sides of an argument are presented to the reader, who then becomes "informed."
But this was never the reality of the profession, and the authority of journalists was always an illusion. The reason it has become "difficult for the average American to tell supposedly objective or balanced mainstream reports from the vast army of opinion mongers" is not because journalists have failed to fulfill their charge, but because the average American is not an appropriately skeptical thinker, has little or no idea about what does and does not constitute an acceptable argument, and does not readily distinguish theory from fact. If I accept that it is the journalist's responsibility to provide me with the information I need to become informed about a given issue, I have abdicated my responsibility to gather information, parse arguments, determine what I and others consider to be an acceptable level of proof, and arrive at a reasonable conclusion that is, nevertheless, always subject to revision or reversal in light of new information or a superior argument.
Mr. Hart and Mr. Greenblatt are lamenting the passing of the idea that the Journalist is, in fact, the Socratic gadfly of American society: an impartial pursuer of Truth, in service to the public good. But Plato, in the person of Socrates, called the written word "the bastard speech." [Phaedrus 276a], a mere image of "the living and breathing word of him who knows." I can only assume that he would think as little of television's talking heads: these are people who are experts in little beyond the presentation of images, which we call "news." In contrast, Plato wrote that an admirable man is one who
[... ] thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much that is playful, and that no written discourse, whether in meter or in prose, deserves to be treated very seriously (and this applies also to the recitations of the rhapsodes, delivered to sway people's minds, without opportunity for questioning and teaching), but that the best of them really serve only to remind us of what we know [... ] that man, Phaedrus, is likely to be such as you and I might pray that we ourselves may become. [Phaedrus 277e-278b]
The pursuit of truth requires active participation on the part of the listener. It is an interrogative process, whether that means a conversation with someone else or the "interrogation" of a written or recorded source using the tools of reason and critical thinking. Hart and Greenblatt and others who lament the passing of "unbiased media" are, in addition to mourning the death of a fiction, expressing regret for the loss of an easy way for Americans to convince themselves that they are informed.
Being truly informed requires effort: the application of mental energy, a certain intellectual self-reliance, and, above all, the acknowledgement of one's own ignorance. A journalist is no substitute for this process, and never has been.
Now--having demonstrated that there's really no point in taking this post very seriously--I'm off to have some decaf.
