If you visited the Emerald Web site earlier this week — no doubt to read one of the masterfully crafted opinion pieces that grace this page in print — you might’ve noticed that getting around the site was slow. Very slow.
After being linked from the Drudge Report — a news and opinion Web site run by Internet muckraker supreme Matt Drudge — throngs of readers visited the site to read a recap of the University’s annual Ruhl Lecture.
Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll delivered the embattled lecture, titled “The Wolf in Reporter’s Clothing: The Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America.” Carroll spent much of his time lambasting journalism and Fox News in particular, blasting commentators such as Bill O’Reilly for misleading their audiences rather than informing them.
“All over the country there are offices that look like newsrooms and there are people in those offices that look for all the world just like journalists, but they are not practicing journalism,” Carroll explained. “They regard the audience with a cold cynicism. They are practicing something I call pseudo-journalism, and they view their audience as something to be manipulated.”
But many of the authors of the 299 feedback posts (as of press time) to the superficially innocuous story see the modern world of journalism differently.
Charles G., a business owner from Tonasket, Wash., defended Fox News in his feedback post (No. 16): “I beg to differ with the esteemed John S. Carroll. There is only one breath of fresh air, truth, honesty and integrity practicing the craft of journalism in the major media today and that IS Fox News! Hence their immense success.”
Potis B. (No. 41) directed the blame for this “false journalism” at Carroll and his colleagues.
“Sadly, this report about Carroll doesn’t mention WHY there is a vastly successful market for so-called ‘pseudo-journalism.’ Maybe it’s because Mr. Carroll and his ilk have badly mismanaged their stewardship of ‘real journalism’?”
Reporters are products of their own time and circumstances. The political attitudes of a reporter who would pass as reasonably objective and nonpartisan today might have blacklisted him in a politically distant time or place.
The lesson? That fair, honest reporting is difficult, but that truly objective journalism in the conventional sense is downright impossible. Any given reporter infuses his stories with a hidden, even unconscious, collection of values, expectations and philosophies. Newspaper space is limited, and so is readers’ time, forcing writers to ask with every story, “Which fact is most important? Which details are most relevant to the story?” But even questions as fundamental to the journalistic process as these are problematic, because answers to these questions are informed through individual ethical judgments and experience and by notions of causality.
“Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness,” late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould argued. “Rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).”
As in the world of science, the difference between fair and unfair in journalism lies in vigilant, steadfast inspection of one’s own prejudices. Faithful news reporters must eternally bear the double burden of striving to expunge bias from their writing while always admitting openly that, despite these efforts, their products are ultimately subjective.
In my favorite feedback post to the story, No. 189, the prudently moderate Don P. from Connecticut suggested, “Perhaps such journalistic Edens are impossible in modern times. We may have to settle for equal representation of opposing viewpoints.”
If individual reporters ought to admit their biases, then it should be a moral imperative that editors and news organizations do the same. If they won’t seek to correct their biases — an unlikely proposition, given the political stakes that affect news media — they should at least admit their positions, so that we can spend more time talking about the news and less time bickering about it. Simply put, Fox News should concede its mostly right-of-center tilt, and the Los Angeles Times should acknowledge its left-of-center slant.
But this proposal is almost less likely, and so the onus of intellectual responsibility returns to the viewer and reader. When consuming media, we must consider each source and story critically, and, time allowing, get our news from a variety of sources. Moreover, we must maintain a mind open to new facts, new interpretations and, ultimately, new ideas.
Futurist Alvin Toffler warns us of the most serious danger of the alternative.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”