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A few months into my first job as a
newspaper reporter, covering the politics of three small Connecticut
River Valley towns for the Middletown Press, I wrote what remains
one of the best things I've ever written, but I never got credit
for it. It was Christmas, December 1973, and Nixon had just
unleashed an armada of B-52s to carpet-bomb North Vietnam, bombing
hospitals, river dikes and residential neighborhoods. I was
so outraged I wrote an editorial condemning the action as a war
crime and fired it off by telex from my bureau office to my editor.
The next day, my essay appeared as the lead editorial of the
newspaper.
Luckily for me, my editor,
the late, great Russell "Derry" D'Oench, who had been
kind of lackluster in his criticism of the war to that point,
agreed with my sentiment. More importantly, while my prose in
that piece was impassioned and my opposition to President Nixon
fervent, he never came and lectured to me about my personal politics
or questioned my daily reporting.
Not so the management of the
New York Times, which has lambasted veteran Supreme Court veteran
Linda Greenhouse for a talk she gave to fellow Harvard alumni
in which she condemned the Bush administration for creating "law-free
zones" in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and elsewhere
around the world, and for "assaulting women's reproductive
freedom" and "hijacking public policy" by "religious
fundamentalism." The paper, we learn, has an "ethical
guideline" saying that news staffers who appear on radio
and TV "should avoid expressing views that go beyond what
they would be allowed to say in the paper." (Never mind
that Greenhouse wasn't speaking for broadcast, but at a private
event at her alma mater.)
The Times ombudsman, Byron
Calame, supports the newspaper in criticizing Greenhouse, writing
in his Sunday column, "The Public Editor," that it
"seems clear" that she "stepped across that line."
Nothing infuriates me more,
as a veteran newspaper reporter, than this repressive notion
that reporters must not have personal politics or personal views,
or that if they do have them, they must keep them strictly to
themselves.
The ideal reporter, it would
seem in this view of things, would be either an ignorant and
insensitive boob without an opinion in her or his head, or else
a robotic stenographer who simply transcribes what various sources
tell her or him, giving equal weight to heartfelt truths and
devious falsehoods. Either option is a recipe for disaster in
terms of the role of the Fourth Estate, which is supposed to
"afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,"
in the words of pioneer journalist Finley Peter Dunne.
What it boils down to is image
over substance. The truth is that the Times knows its reporters-and
its editors and publishers--all have personal political views,
often strongly held, but it doesn't want its readers to know
this. It, and every news organization like it, is actually perpetrating
a massive fraud on the public, pretenting that its staffmembers
have no personal politics.
This is of course nonsense,
and most people who give it a moment's thought know it.
So why the charade?
I would argue that most likely
the real reason is fear.
Linda Greenhouse, I suspect,
would not have been taken to the woodshed by her bosses if she
had, in her Harvard speech, decried the lack of patriotism evidenced
by those who protest the war in Iraq even as our soldiers are
dying there, or if she had complained of a lack of spiritual
values on the part of of our governing class-in other words,
if she had said exactly the opposite of that which she was criticized
for saying.
Let's be honest here: it was
the fact that she was criticizing the government from the left
that made her a target of criticism.
And the New York Times is not
alone. CNN dumped one of its best reporters, Peter Arnett, largely
because he was too public in his critiques and reportorial exposés
of U.S. militarism. The San Francisco Chronicle fired a columnist
whose specialty was writing about technology, because he had
publicly demonstrated against the Iraq War. The ranks of reporters
and editors who have lost their jobs, or been shifted off of
beats, because of taking political positions in their private
lives that are to the left of mainstream are legion. Yet one
would be hard-pressed to find reporters and editors who had lost
their jobs because of expressing personal political views that
are to the right-for example in support of American imperialist
adventures, mindless patriotism, unfettered free market capitalism,
faith-based public policy, etc.
Our corporate news media are
basically afraid to be seen as institutional critics of power
and the established political concensus, and yet that is precisely
the role that the Constitution, in singling them out for special
attention and privilege in the First amendment, expects them
to play. They cannot play the role of critic if they insist
on neutering their staffs. And they insult and do a disservice
to their readers and viewers when they try to pretend that those
staffs are devoid of political views.
Journalists, if they are doing
their jobs, need to dig deeply and understand the issues and
the political forces that are at work in society and in the world.
In doing that-in digging for the truth-it would be incredible
if they did not arrive at some personal opinions as to who was
honest and well-meaning and who was dishonest and conniving.
It would be incredible if they did not develop opinions as to
what policies were good for society or for the world, and which
were destructive.
The job of those journalists
then is to present what they know with integrity and fairness.
That's a tough challenge but it can be done. It won't be done,
however, by reporters who are incapable of feeling, thinking
for themselves, and forming their own views.
How then, is the public helped
by taking those journalists who have the intelligence and good
horse-sense to see or to find the truth, that they must keep
that discovery to themselves? Far better, I'd say, to let reporters,
on their own time, say what they think, and then let the reader
or viewer make her or his own judgement as to the veracity of
what those reporters tell them on the job.
My answer to the Times and
to ombudsman Calame is: Free Linda Greenhouse! Free the Press!
CounterPunch
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