Journalistic Deficiencies: Metaphors Differ
July 16, 2018 8:36 PM   Subscribe

David Roberts argues that journalists' desire to appear unbiased impacts their ability to understand the substance:
[I]magine covering substantive disputes every day but not allowing yourself to develop opinions about them. It takes will & effort!  [ . . . ] Political/policy analysis, when done well, is developed through dialog. [ . . . ] It's a muscle that requires exercise. And "objective" reporters don't exercise it. [ . . . ]  I've seen it again & again: when I can cajole "objective" reporters into sharing their opinions on, oh, the national debt, or climate policy, or electoral dynamics, those opinions are almost always shockingly flat-footed & childlike.
[Threadreader link for the twitter averse]

This overlaps with an earlier point by Jay Rosen who coined the term Cult of the Savvy and complained how reporting on the horse race leads to contempt for actual policy and principles:
. . . the cult of the savvy, my term for the ideology and political style that journalists like Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin spread through their work. The savvy severs any lingering solidarity between journalists as the providers of information, and voters as decision-makers in need of it. The savvy sets up — so it can speak to and cultivate — a third group between these two: close followers of the game. [ . . . ][Political junkies] get to feel superior to ordinary voters, who are the objects of technique and of the savvy analyst’s smart read on what is likely to work in the next election. [ . . . ] Whereas the junkies can hope for admission to the secrets of the game (by taking cues from Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin and the guys at Politico) the activists are hopelessly deluded, always placing their own ideology before the cold hard facts. 

If you follow the Twitter feeds of Ron Fournier of National Journal and Chuck Todd of NBC you routinely see people they call “partisans” described as silly, insane, overheated, unreasonable. Somewhere in their dinosaur brains those who “live off” politics understand that the people who live for it could steal their constituency and turn the savvy into the absurd creatures. Thus the constant ridicule of partisans.
Complaints about false equivalence or both sides do it journalism are common enough, especially when discussing science policy reporting. It's also called Broderism in the political context, after the famous "Dean of the Washington Press Corps".  But I think Roberts and Rosen are interesting in focusing not how this skews individual stories or topics but impacts the journalists themselves.

Regardless, frustration with this approach has been going on a while. The title of this post reference's Krugman complaint from the 2000 election: If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ''Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.''
posted by mark k (6 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
What I keep saying to friends who are asking why the Trump/Russia thing is suddenly making journalists freak out now is: These people are courtiers. They've outlasted several regimes. They know the game and it's supposed to have rules. That's why there's always the frantic attempts to normalize, to make Trump fit into a coherent narrative, and why there's the reflexive "but of course both sides are equally bad": because that's the way the game has always been played. The Democrats say this, the Republicans say that, and the press and savvy Washington insiders chortle to themselves and keep going to work.

It's why Trump as a candidate kept defying their narratives: Because he didn't give a shit what they said and, in fact, didn't watch them since he was usually watching Fox, if anything, so all the clucking and shaming and "surely this!" moments were ignored, because he felt no heat from them, because he wasn't involved in the game at all.

It's part of the change in politics that Republicans really started with the tea party and true believer partisans, because it did used to BE the game where you'd go back to your district and rail about the Evil Communist Socialists or Evil Republicans, get re-elected, then meet up with those some people and have drinks and chuckle at the rubes who bought it, then get down to the business of running the country.

If politics is like wrestling--a lot of theatrics and melodrama that's all scripted, but played out for the rubes in the cheap seats--then what happened is Republicans started running and electing marks, people that think wrestling is actually real. Of COURSE they're outraged when Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage are seen together. They're mortal enemies!

Like I said in the Trump thread, the political class is losing their shit like "TRUMP DOESN'T RESPECT NATO?!" Based on the evidence, why on Earth would you think Trump respects ANYTHING? But of course, that's not the game, the game and Very Serious People know that the NATO alliance is sacrosanct for the US, you don't mess with that, and these journalists are Very Serious People.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 10:31 PM on July 16, 2018 [18 favorites]


If you consider the great journalists in history, you don’t see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko... I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don’t quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective.
- Hunter Thompson
posted by talos at 3:27 AM on July 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


And worst of all, it makes the journalists in question *incredibly easy marks for liars & hucksters.*
..... are allowed to say that it's bad & wrong for Pruitt to, say, get chauffeured around seeking lotion ...
16. ... but they're not allowed to say it's bad & wrong to allow coal companies to dump more toxins in the water.


Does the "unbiased" effort reduce the factual reporting of "EVLCorp dumps toxins in our rivers"?

Fox reporting on certain hard news can be clearer and accurate than some of the other channels. CNN's more moral reporting can get dreary hyperfocused on picayune details that obscure and just annoy.

Is it a bad thing for our cadre of hard objective reporters to be a bit color blind at a certain level if they continue to reveal solid information about the dark corners of the world? It's too bad if smart folks in an area are not developing rational opinions but I bet there are other smart segments (mathematicians, hyperfocused researchers) without rounded opinions of the world. Too bad for these folks but does it hurt the reporting?
posted by sammyo at 5:14 AM on July 17, 2018


Is it a bad thing for our cadre of hard objective reporters to be a bit color blind at a certain level if they continue to reveal solid information about the dark corners of the world?

Objectively, looking at Trump, yes, which is the point of the article. Trump is a genuine danger, and any system that enables him is bad. When he's gone, we have serious Democracy Repair to engage in, and journalism is part of it.
posted by JHarris at 5:39 AM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Is it a bad thing for our cadre of hard objective reporters to be a bit color blind at a certain level if they continue to reveal solid information about the dark corners of the world?

"If" does a lot of work in that sentence. My personal desire isn't more opinions from journalisms, it's more information about dark corners of the world.

I'm sure you've heard the observation after some deep investigation into sleaze that "the real scandal isn't how much was illegal, but what was legal." The Roberts tweets articulate for me another complaint: when something scandalous is legal, the press will treat it as a policy dispute. And not even run the story, as a policy dispute about particulate emissions is boring until the sky is black. So to use your example "EvilCorp dumps toxins" is in fact *not* reported because of these conventions.

I'm not sure I'm 100% in Roberts camp that journalists can't do analysts anymore have childish levels of understanding, though partly because it's so tempting for me to believe. But beyond science reporting I've found the coverage on things like consume debt and bankruptcy to deficit reduction to health care cost control bizarre, because the stated goal of legislation is so obviously not served by the policies. It seemed like objective reporters could and should be grilling people on that hypocrisy even by their own rules. I assumed they were uncomfortable seeming partisan but simply not understanding policy implications actually explains a solid minority of bad coverage too.
posted by mark k at 7:00 AM on July 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Bias is tricky. Take a murder case and a jury. It is unbiased to hear the evidence and agree that it is probably the defendant who did it, as long as the jury consider themselves equals to both the victim and the defendant. Then there is the problem of the jury being biased against the victim, by seeing it as some kind of necessary killing. What it all means is that two approaches are needed, one to find for guilt or innocence, and the other to determine sentencing, if any. By analogy, journalism needs to consider the victims of a policy, and the benefactors of a policy. This can be termed moderation, as in moderating a discussion. There is no neutrality needed between journalist and either party of the investigation, other the object of determining the neutrality of the policy itself. That could mean that the journalist can be biased for one party, as in considering themselves equals, since this lends motivating factors that uncover abuses in order to report on the neutrality of the policy.
posted by Brian B. at 7:37 AM on July 17, 2018


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