Ideology and the Media: Journalists should stop pretending they have no point of view

[BurtWorm]

This idea, from Jay Rosen of PressThink.org, is one whose time has come, especially in light of what's going on with Keith Olbermann and MSNBC. This is a post of Rosen's going back to July, in the wake of the firing of David Weigel, who wrote a Washington Post blog on the right wing, after he was outed by conservatives as a "leftist" courtesy of some intemperate remarks about teabaggers on a private list for journalists. Rosen was responding to Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic who challenged the idea that anything was wrong with the status quo:

http://pressthink.org/2010/06/fixing-the-ideology-problem-in-our-political-press-a-reply-to-the-atlantics-marc-ambinder/


What ought to be the ideology of the political press and how should they handle this trickiest of problems in professional practice? #

I go back to the theme of my Clowns and Jokers post: “this is complicated.” I don’t think there is one answer. I would not trust any magic solution or single device. Nor do I think my answers exclusively correct. It certainly isn’t possible to pick a point on the political spectrum and say: Journalists should be Scoop Jackson Democrats or Jim Leach Republicans. But there are some things they can do. #

Transition from the institutional voice to the individual journalist with a voice. This is already happening. The “voice of god,” a disembodied language in which the news came to be presented, is slowly being phased out while the opportunities for journalists to speak with voice and interact as human beings are on the rise. The symbol of this shift is the reporter who also blogs, but an even better marker is the blogger who is hired to do a job that a “straight” reporter might have done before, as with Ezra Klein covering health care reform and other wonkish subjects for the Washington Post. During the dramatic battles of 2009-10, Klein had no trouble making his views known on health care reform and reporting with credibility on the issue, a combination once thought impossible. #

Gradually replace the view from nowhere with “here’s where I’m coming from.” The weakening of the institutional voice is good news for those who would like to find a better solution to the (tricky) problem of ideology in political journalism. The discovery that users want to make a connection to the people who bring them the news is also useful. These developments prepare the ground for the bigger and harder shift that awaits political journalists, which is to abandon the View from Nowhere as a means for generating trust and replace it with “here’s where I’m coming from,” which is a different—and, increasingly, a more plausible—way of generating trust. #

(On this point see The Case for Full Disclosure by James Poniewozik of Time and my own post from two years ago: Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality. For a more philosophical treatment see David Weinberger, Transparency is the New Objectivity. And if you’re really interested in these issues, watch my bloggingheads.tv exchange with Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute.) #

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[BurtWorm]

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