CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books: The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.

What kind of world would it be if every reporter covering the current Presidential campaign announced who they intended to vote for? Or who they voted for in the last Presidential election?

If anyone had asked me this back when I was in the daily news biz (she cackled in her dotage), I would have laughed. It was like questioning the law of gravity. The answer would have not been no, it would have been HELL, no. Reporters didn’t do that. Reporters stayed outside the fray, in order to be fair to all sides.

Did this mean we had no personal opinions? Don’t be silly! Of course we did. Politics was a prime topic of conversation when we went out for drinks after work, all the more fun to talk about because of the inside dope we had—who the Serial Gropers were, whose teenage son had gotten busted for drugs, and did you hear Congressman X’s wife was on the sauce again? Granted, there were a few Puritans in the business, like Washington Post Editor Leonard Downie, who believed that abstaining from voting was the only way to really preserve one’s journalistic objectivity. This was an intellectually defensible position, but in practice most of us thought it was just a bit holier-than-thou. On Election Day, we voted along with everybody else. If anybody had asked how we could have a personal opinion on public topics and still write about those topics objectively, we would have said that well, we were still citizens, and anyway, we were Professional Journalists; we knew how to keep these things in separate mental drawers. Exactly how we developed this paranormal ability we were rarely pressed to explain, which was a good thing.

And for a long time, we got away with this. As the years passed, and the era of Edward R. Murrow gave way to Vietnam and Watergate and the Reagan Revolution, this institutional charade became increasingly ridiculous. But you couldn’t tell us that. Like a pot-bellied guy in his Speedo, we wore our objectivity proudly. On us, you see, it looked great.

The result of all this I need not describe in detail: a couple of decades’ worth of right-wing attacks about the “liberalmediaelite,” which gave rise to outlets like Fox News, and, today, a distrust of the Establishment Media that encompasses both ends of the political spectrum. To which those of us in the Establishment Media have generally reacted as if we had been accused of beating up little kids for their lunch money—that is, with a combination of outrage, amusement and condescension. Anyone who accuses us of wrongdoing simply doesn’t understand journalistic ethics, we would say.

Which is true. But—and I have come to this conclusion after a long time now looking at the daily news business from the outside in—this is not because the public’s too stupid to understand our standards; it’s because our standards are too dumb to be understood.

Let me illustrate.

Last August, the Cleveland Plain Dealer decided to begin an experiment in online journalism by hiring four bloggers—two liberal, two conservative—to write about an Ohio congressional campaign. The project, called Wide Open, had barely begun when it came to light that one of the bloggers had written a $100 campaign contribution check to one of the candidates in the race. A staff writer at The Plain Dealer reported this fact; the Plain Dealer fired the blogger, one of the liberals; the other liberal blogger resigned in protest; and the paper’s reader representative, Ted Diadium, closed down Wide Open shortly thereafter.
“Any reporter knows that giving to a political campaign is prima facie conflict of interest,” Diadium wrote shortly after this happened, and he went on to state the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s version of the Journalistic Law of Gravity: “You can't contribute to a political candidate and then write about his or her campaign, either as an employee or as a paid free-lancer for The Plain Dealer, on paper or online. Period.”
In a separate statement, Editor Susan Goldberg went on to elaborate on this stand. "The issue is our financial tie to these four bloggers. To allow someone we pay to use our site to, potentially, lobby for a candidate they financially support would put us in a place we can't go. Had we known that he had contributed to the opponent of a person he might write about, we wouldn't have put him on the blog in the first place."

In other words, it was okay that these bloggers had political leanings, but to put their money where their mouth was—no way. The fact that money actually changed hands somehow takes the relationship between blogger and candidate to an entirely different moral level, and forever taints the relationship between newspaper and blogger. Why? Because it creates a financial link, however tenuous, between the paper and the candidate in question.

But how, exactly, does this happen? Can the Cleveland Plain Dealer be bought for a mere hundred bucks?

Of course not! Defenders of the Plain Dealer would say. But, they might add, money is an important symbol in our society—arguably the most important symbol of all—and a line must be drawn or we will lose our readers’ trust. At least, this is the argument I would have once made myself. But times are changing, and old symbols may no longer mean what they used to. Lately, I have found that many of the journalistic verities I took for granted when I was a young reporter just don’t make sense anymore, and this is one.

Money is a symbol, all right. So is a wedding ring. Yet in itself, a wedding ring has never stopped anybody from philandering, and people nip off to Vegas every day to legalize relationships which will not outlive the average housefly. Meanwhile, as we now know, millions of gay couples have lived for decades in committed relationships which exist outside of any legal framework. A wedding ring is symbol of something intangible, a covenant of trust. Nowadays, we recognize that this covenant can exist within the legal bounds of marriage, or outside of it.

Just as the social definition of “marriage” is in flux, so is the definition of “journalist.” Back in the Old Days, when we were the self-appointed gatekeepers to the information flow, none of us would have dreamed of giving money to a political candidate. Back then, not giving money to a candidate was just a visible expression of an unspoken covenant, which was our responsibility to listen honestly, to ask good questions, and to report what we saw and heard. We were citizens, yes, but citizens with front-row seats. Giving up the right to donate money to a candidate you really liked was a small price to pay for the perks we enjoyed as journalists.

But that was then and this is now—and now is the point where the Old Rules completely run off the rails.

The Old Rules say bloggers are not “real” journalists. But if they’re not real journalists, why did the Plain Dealer insist they abide by real-journalist rules? How can a campaign contribution be a fatal expression of political bias in a blogger who was hired partly because of his political leanings? Conversely, if they are real journalists, how can a reputable newspaper justify hiring a political reporter with known biases? What’s the operating principle here?

Either the bloggers were hired because their insights added value to the news gathering process—which I think they would have—or they were simply a kind of op-ed freak show, an opportunity for liberals and conservatives alike to see what the “lunatic fringe” on the other side was spouting that week. I don’t believe the Plain Dealer was guilty of exploitation (though I would love to know how much those bloggers were getting paid per hour, compared to the paper’s regular political reporters). But it was guilty of being inconsistent. It bent the rules when it came to trying something new—which I applaud them for—and then hastily re-imposed the Old Rules at the first hint of controversy. The bloggers, by the way, were bewildered and outraged by this whole thing. I can’t blame them. I can’t make sense of it, either.

Which brings me back to my original question. What if we just ditched the old rules altogether? What if the reporters signed up to cover a Presidential campaign—and this means everybody from bloggers to the national political correspondent for the New York Times—had a small online bio which would say something like, “I voted for Kerry last time, and the issues that really get my attention usually have to do with social trends and the health care system.” Or, “I’m a fiscal and social conservative with a graduate degree in economics; I haven’t made up my mind yet.” Or even, “I’m a horse-race reporter. If you just love the day-to-day inside political dope on tactics, I’m your guy.”

What if, in short, we had some New Rules—to wit:
1. Reporters vote, too.
2. Reporters have an obligation not to be fair to people, but fair to the facts.
3. Reporters let you know where they’re coming from.

Do I hear any seconds from the back of the bus? ……Anybody?



http://www.cleveland.com/readers/index.ssf?/base/opinion-0/119416912484390.xml&coll=2#continue