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Wednesday, October 9, 2002
03:46 a.m.
NY Times 'bias' outcry - objective reporting fallacy all over again
The 'campaign' against the Times's anti-war bias in its news pages which really got going after the notorious Kissinger 'incident' is still going strong. (Even Dick Morris is on the case - link courtesy of Instapundit.)
The latest beef concerns an article on a poll on (among other things) attitudes to the war: the questions were biased, the article misrepresented the results, yadda, yadda, yadda.
You wonder whether it's safe to mention to these hard-bitten journos and pols that Santa Claus does't exist! The only amazing thing about the story is the amazement. They're journalists, ergo they 'lie'.
In the meaning of 'lie', as well as deliberate falsehoods I also include spin, being 'economical with the truth', omission, operating a news agenda - I don't believe there's a suitable word for this enlarged concept.
By the very nature of news, it's not possible for a news outlet to avoid 'lying'. The idea that a newspaper can hermetically seal its news pages from ideology and give 'just the facts' is absurd.
There was certainly a time when the fiction was believed: 'objective reporting' was the term of art which described the policy operating in the 50s whereby newspapers would print whatever came out of any branch of government 'straight' in their news pages: even if it were demonstrably untrue, they would only point that out in op-ed columns!
Thus Joe McCarthy could quote as many different numbers as he liked of Communists in the State Department, the papers would print them all (Edwin Bayley's book covers the whole sorry Joe-Press relationship!)
And, for years, phoney stuff from the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations on Laos and Vietnam slipped in without question.
Provenance was all. Was that impartial or ideology-free? Of course not - there was a Cold War on, and the papers were choosing to back the national security establishment, right or wrong.
Of course, a news outlet may strive for 'balance' on its news pages, may seek to avoid inflammatory treatment of issues and so. But that also, of course, imports an ideology; and requires quite as much selection and 'handling' (in the movie sense) as the old Hearst-type proprietor-driven news process.
And the public? A quick check at Gallup is at first glance somewhat alarming: asked last month (I paraphrase) how much they trusted the news media in general, 10% said 'a great deal' and 44% 'a fair amount'. I'm tempted to DIY-analyse the figures (who exactly are the 10% of trusting souls, is there a 'spiral of silence' reluctance to criticise media most respondents used, why there are 0% 'no opinions' etc.) but won't.
At least there are 90% of the American public who take the Times and the rest of the rags with a good deal more than a pinch of salt!
[Whilst on the subject of objectivity, Krauthammer - whose article seems to have kicked things off - starts his diatribe with an astonishing assertion:
Not since William Randolph Hearst famously cabled his correspondent in Cuba, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war," has a newspaper so blatantly devoted its front pages to editorializing about a coming American war as has Howell Raines's New York Times.
Now, the online archives don't go back that far - but I'd make a modest wager that the front page of Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune in 1940-1 was rather more 'editorialized' about World War 2 than the Times's this year about Iraq. Or, for that matter, the front pages of any number of papers in Wisconsin and most points west.
So Krauthammer's caught out in a lie (or a 'lie', at least).
But that's OK. Because he's Op-Ed, not News.
Now I'm worrying about those 10%.....]
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