So here goes the hand wringing over Bill Dedman’s MSNBC story on “Journalists who wrote political checks.” Right-wing extremists are practically wetting their collective pants because the vast majority of those contributions went to Democrats and left-leaning organizations.
“See! We told you! The mainstream media is biased! You must trust blogs for your news because they’re biased too!” Not great logic, but it makes for good screaming.
But wait. Let’s deconstruct Dedman’s list to see what it really means.
It lists 144 “journalists” who “made campaign contributions from 2004 through the first quarter of 2007.” It turns out, however that such a statement is a bit misleading. Not everyone on the list is a journalist, although they work for journalism companies. And some of those who are journalists weren’t at the time they made their contributions.
Further, some of their beats have nothing to do with politics; there’s no conflict of interest.
Let’s get more specific.
Of the 144, more than 40 drop off the list immediately; they aren’t journalists except in a very broad sense. They’re copy editors, graphic designers, anchors and hosts, critics, etc. (For example, does it mean anything that the Boston Globe’s sports statistician gave to a Democrat?)
Then you can eliminate a bunch who cover beats that wouldn’t be affected by their politics — Tad Friend, Hollywood reporter for the New Yorker, for example, or Charles Perry, food writer for the Los Angeles Times.
That brings the list down to about 82 people. A handful of them might be expected to donate to certain campaigns. Is anyone surprised that someone from Fox News gave money to a Republican, or someone from Air America or Rolling Stone gave to a Democrat?
Speaking of Rolling Stone, of the remaining journalists on the list work for organizations that, honestly, no one is turning to for hard news. You’ll find interesting and insightful features in the New Yorker, certainly, but let’s be real — it’s not ABC or CNN.
We’ve knocked more than 100 people off the list already. The remaining 40 or so include reporters, writers, and editors, but the list doesn’t give their beats. So there’s no way to know whether Terry Judd, reporter for the Muskegon (Mich.) Chronicle or Stephen Marks, reporter for New Delhi Television have anything to say about political coverage.
The Society of Professional Journalists has, according to its Web site, almost 10,000 members. So what Dedman and MSNBC discovered is that, of the thousands of journalists in the country whose work might be influenced by their political views, at least 40 of them have donated to a politician or political group.
This is big news?
But there’s a bigger issue. The complaint is, for some reason, about the fact that these people expressed what could reasonably be considered a political bias — a bias that, it’s argued, might well be affecting their reporting.
The answer, of course, is to only trust journalists who have no bias whatsoever. Good luck with that.
What the people doing the hand-wringing over Dedman’s story are saying is that it’s all right to have a bias, but you’re compromised if people know about it.
That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t people be more concerned about hidden bias? Is asking journalists to hide their political leanings a good thing? Do you trust someone more if you don’t know his leanings?
The foolishness of the idea is clear in what Dedham wrote: “Because appearing to be fair is part of being fair, most mainstream news organizations discourage marching for causes.”
Read that again: Because appearing to be fair is part of being fair…
Huh? Appearing to be something is part of being it? If I dress like a pilot often enough, I’ll be able to fly? Fake it till you make it?
Instead of carefully considered investigative journalism, it smacks more of using a magnifying glass to see a molehill as a mountain.
The Fray
Eric Berlin says:
Do you actually read the New Yorker? The magazine’s in-depth news reporting, especially from reporters such as Jeffrey Goldberg, David Remnick, and Sy Hersh, is extremely influential.
Also, the right wingers who you believe are going crazy from this agree with you that Dedham is way off base. They don’t want reporters hiding their biases, and they are amused at attempts by certain institutions that prohibit their workers from making campaign donations — as if the very act of giving money to a political party is what causes bias. Ridiculous. So you can poll the reporting staff of the New York Time and learn that only a few of them have given money to political causes. That doesn’t mean they’re unbiased. If we polled those same folks and asked who would they give money to if they could, do you honestly believe the results would be anything less than 90% left-wing?
Hart Williams says:
Er … it’s ‘Sturgeon’s Law’: “90% of everything is crud.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon‘s_law
Kelly says:
Whoa, dude. I’m tempted to sic a bear on you.
How are copy editors journalists only in a general sense?
We can write “slanted” headlines/cutlines, and modify stories.
So. :P
Leland says:
Hey Andrew, I realize the I only worked a few years as a journalist and that it was for a county weekly and another county 5-day a week paper. But the managing editor’s policy there was that if you contributed to a local campaign, you could not write about that race. We could not even endorse a candidate with a bumper sticker.
Now maybe that is not the norm, however it was the rule. In retrospect, I think it was a good one. Especially in an area with a really small population and voter base.
Gnomic says:
I’d be happy if “journalists” quit reporting thier opinions and speculations as news and did more than repeat press releases. It seems as if they are trying to push Stergeon’s Law to 99%.