In Daniel Okrent's latest column he decries the uncritical reporting that has become all the rage today. He's wondering why reporters don't correct the spin they're fed even when that's all they have to work with. It's not a bad question, but Mr. Okrent doesn't bother to answer it and instead turns the focus back onto the mysterious forces that compel reporters to be objective, without telling them what objective means. Or worse, telling them that objectivity leads to creating a false balance (Okrent's Law). So now the question becomes who's pressuring reporters to find balance where there is none? But that doesn't get answered either. Instead we get a history lesson, some incompatible examples and a defense of "some of the very best journalists in the country."
After a long opening, Mr. Okrent compares Robin Toner and Robert Pear completely caving to the spin that enveloped the corporate media upon Reagan's death to Jodi Wilgoren's strange and incongruous characterization of Kerry, a man with scores of friends and associates, as "a social loner." He defends Toner and Pear shooting the spin by saying that "I suspect that when writers don't comment on specious statements, it's usually because they worry that any challenge might itself seem tendentious." There's the problem that Mr. Okrent is ignoring. When did it become the job of the press to avoid the risk of appearing tendentious? Who's calling the press partisan and what is their proof? If he's worried about those accusations without questioning their merit, he should give Eric Alterman a call and find out what "working the refs" means. Spin is lies. It's that simple and as Josh Marshall has said, catching a liar lying isn't a coup; it's a definition.
It's this rushing to embrace spin without question that is the much bigger problem at the NYT. Witness the most recent example of Carl Hulse's unquestioning reguritation of Bonilla's and DeLay's scurrilous comments about Ronnie Earle. Mr. Okrent suggests in his last paragraph that the problem at the NYT is that reporters are unable to tell us what they "know to be true": (get ready to laugh)
My beat's here on West 43rd Street, where some of the very best journalists in the country keep what they know off the page because they've been tied up by an imprecise definition of objectivity. I'm not calling for unsupported opinion, but for a flowering of facts - not just those recorded stenographically or uttered by experts, but the sort that arise from experience, knowledge and a brave willingness to stand behind what you know to be true.
But the real problem is that the paper doesn't bother to find out what's true - only what it's told. Reporters aren't hobbled by definitions of objectivity. They're hobbled by not doing their job. As funny as that last paragraph is, there is one even funnier in a tragic way. Mr. Okrent is telling us that bias is inherent in journalism; even how stories are chosen for reporting is a biased process:
As for major investigative pieces, they generally start not because they are propelled by a piece of news but because a reporter or an editor determines - often out of white-hot passion - that "This is important. This is something we must do." Most investigations, by nature, carry a point a view.
He're right, of course, but when was the last time the NYT tackled a major investigative piece? The closest I've seen them come this year is the Making Votes Count series of editorials, which was never supported by any quality reporting in the paper.
I'd like to see a Public Editor column look at what the NYT thinks its function is in a democracy. I know that Mr. Okrent has found out that the label "Paper of Record" was foisted on the NYT against its will. I know that Mr. Okrent says that the NYT is a liberal paper and that he sees no bias in its reporting, although others do. I know that the paper acknowledged bad reporting in the rush to war in Iraq. Elisabeth Bumiller has said that we're now going to see "really good journalism" to make up for that. But what does anyone at that place think "really good journalism" is?
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