If you didn't catch, Sunday's Dan Okrent piece in the NY Times on
"objectivity" was worth a read.


-- 

Jon Entine
Miami University

(513) 527-4385  FAX: 527-4386
http://www.jonentine.com


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New York Times
November 14, 2004

THE PUBLIC EDITOR

It's Good to Be Objective. It's Even Better to Be Right.
By DANIEL OKRENT

In my Oct. 31 column, I took a crude hatchet to The Times's wimpy reliance
on "experts," "analysts" and other commentators whose words may decorate a
given article but often provide neither coherence nor much more than the
illusion of balance.

Surprisingly, I didn't hear from any experts determined to defend their
positions in the address books of Times reporters. Maybe that's because some
of them have established impregnable beachheads: Prof. Stephen Gillers of
N.Y.U. has made 24 appearances in The Times so far this year (five under his
own name, the rest in pieces by Times writers); Tom Wolzien of Sanford C.
Bernstein and Company has shown up 28 times; and the inevitable Gene
Russianoff has appeared fully 46 times, in pieces by 23 different writers.
Russianoff is a "staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a transit
advocacy group," a label The Times has slapped on him the way Homer glued
"gray-eyed goddess" to Athena.

Russianoff has been the Oracle of the Subways since ... well, almost since
there were straps for straphangers. (New to the city 35 years ago, I thought
the word was pronounced "straffengers," with a soft g.)

Times reporters assure me that he is reliable, honest and well informed. I
believe this to be true, as I'm confident it is of Gillers and Wolzien as
well, and maybe even of Hall of Famer Norman Quotestein, a k a Ornstein, of
the American Enterprise Institute.

But if I believe these experts are all good and wise, it's because I believe
the reporters who tell me so. Why, I wonder, do I need the analysis of an
expert or the expertise of the analyst, when it's the writer I'm finally
compelled to rely upon in any case?

In fact, there are often good reasons to turn to experts - for instance,
when the desk dumps an assignment in your lap three hours before deadline,
on a subject you know little about. But there's also the need to protect
that precious piece of the journalistic ethos, objectivity - in the words of
one deputy news editor, Philip Corbett, "not only a worthy goal, but
probably our most important one: the goal that underpins most of our other
ideals, like fairness and accuracy." And reporters think that getting an
"expert" to comment adds the aura of objectivity.

In recent years, though, the concept of objectivity has taken a bit of a
beating. Some journalists (and critics of journalists) argue that it is in
fact unachievable; we all bring our experiences, sensibilities and innate
prejudices to the door, and even the act of attempting to leave them on the
stoop will alter our approach.

Besides, you can't police objectivity simply by scouring an article for
evidences of bias, imbalance or other taints. Try starting with the headline
writer, who is inherently constrained by space yet charged with distilling
essences from what is often an extremely complex stew - a necessarily
reductive act that can't help but deform nuances. Then there's the editor
who determines placement: "Ex-C.I.A. Chief Nets $500,000 on Talk Circuit"
would have been interesting on A26 last Thursday; on A1, it carried a
suggestion of scandal.

And before an article finds its way into the paper - sometimes long before -
the decision to assign it is itself influenced by personal predisposition.
"In Health Care, Gap Between Rich and Poor Persists, W.H.O. Says," also in
Thursday's paper, was a discretionary choice. It made it into print on one
desk editor's watch, but could have been just as plausibly ignored had
someone else, with even a slightly different worldview, been sitting in the
same chair that day. 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.

When it comes to objectivity, then, the determinative factor is who's doing
the determining. In any enterprise, there are few decisions as important as
whom you hire and promote; in a newspaper, where every choice has meaning,
it's virtually the only thing that matters.

The historical roots of objectivity as a journalistic ideal suggest there's
more to it than parking one's opinions at the curb. Before it was applied
specifically to journalism, the idea of objectivity grew out of a variety of
early 20th century intellectual movements recognizing that somewhere in the
swamps of conscious and unconscious thought, people could be biased without
knowing it. By the 1920's Walter Lippmann and others were arguing that
reporters could combat unconscious bias by applying scientific method and
its "sense of evidence" to journalistic inquiry. Only by the rigorous
testing of hypotheses could the investigator - the journalist - reach
reliable, bias-free conclusions. The key word, and the one that has
disappeared from the definition over several generations, is "conclusions."
Fairness requires the consideration of all sides of an issue; it doesn't
require the uncritical reporting of any. Yet even the best reporters will
sometimes display a disappointing reluctance to set things straight.

THAT'S why I was so exasperated last June, shortly after Ronald Reagan's
death, to see a classic balancing statement pop up and sit there
unchallenged, in an article by Robin Toner and Robert Pear. "Critics See a
Reagan Legacy Tainted by AIDS, Civil Rights and Union Policies" (June 9,
2004) included this: "Gary Bauer, Mr. Reagan's domestic policy adviser for
the last two years of his administration, countered that spending on AIDS
research rose under Mr. Reagan." Bauer's comment may have balanced what
Reagan's detractors had to say, but the writers' failure to challenge it
denied readers an objective truth: AIDS funding couldn't help but rise under
Reagan, because there was no AIDS funding before Reagan - in fact, there was
no AIDS before Reagan.

I suspect that when writers don't comment on specious statements, it's
usually because they worry that any challenge might itself seem tendentious.
And it's true that many readers do find conclusive statements objectionable.
Reporter Jodi Wilgoren provoked a flood of complaints when she described
John Kerry in April as "a social loner" without attributing her
characterization to anyone - as if her own experience covering the senator,
and discussing him with scores of his friends and associates, were not
evidence enough. Similarly, readers complained when Neil Lewis, in "Mixed
Results for Bush in Battles Over Judges" (Oct. 22), followed a description
of the president's early judicial appointments with this: "There could have
been no clearer signal that Mr. Bush intended to follow the pattern set by
his father and President Ronald Reagan of shifting the courts rightward and
reaping the political benefit of pleasing social conservatives." Those who
objected argued that it was the writer's opinion, and improper - even
though, as one acknowledged, it was undeniably true.

But haven't we reached the point where denying the reader what a writer
knows to be true is far more unfair than including it? I was delighted when,
in "After 6 Months, Tyco Prosecutors Close Case Against Ex-Officials" (March
18), Alex Berenson described the prosecutor's case as "bewildering,"
"tedious" and having "rarely been presented in a straightforward way" - a
vision of the trial that would have been utterly unavailable had Berenson
not dared to offer conclusive characterizations based on his own
observations. On a much larger scale, I was dismayed when a reporter for The
Wall Street Journal in a letter to friends (later passed around the
Internet) described the horrors of life in Baghdad, and was criticized in
some quarters for thereby jeopardizing her impartiality. But what she
described was based on indisputable first-hand experience. If there was a
journalistic offense here, it was that readers of The Journal had been
denied knowledge of what this reporter knew to be true. Whom did that serve?

I shouldn't knock The Journal, which admirably allows its reporters far more
authority to make assertions in their own voices than most American dailies,
and which hasn't asked me to be its public editor. 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.

The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and
conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this
section.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company