Peter Goodman vs. Bill Keller iof the New York Times: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps
Peter Goodman:
Beyond Left And Right: It's About Reality: For far too long, the public has suffered under the tyranny of dueling narratives served up by one or another interest group seeking self-serving shortcuts around nuanced truths, all the while shortchanging the clarity of important debates about the biggest issues of the day -- from health care reform to defense policy to education. Journalists have too often perpetuated the false notion that seemingly any issue can be cleanly divided into right and left, conservative and liberal, because these labels make our work simpler, supplying us with a handy structure we can impose at will on typically uncooperative facts.
Journalists so frequently deal in the false liberal-conservative dichotomy because it generates the sort of tension that feeds narrative, and narrative makes for more accessible stories. Simply dividing up the interests into two neatly-differentiated competing camps enables lazy beat reporters to claim to have painted all of reality with but two phone calls. Why venture outside and talk to ordinary people -- whose experiences and views almost always challenge the traditional labels -- when we can simply sit at our desks and dial up a D and then an R and gather a pair of quotes that supposedly cover the whole spectrum of the American take on anything?
Political hacks trade in the labels of right and left because it allows them to manipulate the public with shortcut phrases that demonize those in the other camp....
What we need now is an active journalism engaged in figuring out how to restore those basic middle-class aspirations, without getting sidetracked into tendentious debates about right versus left and which side is winning.
What do these labels really mean, anyway, and who gets to assign them, and for what aim?...
Left versus right: These are overly-simplified labels that perpetuate division, and we ought not cater to them, because that amounts to lazy journalism. That is about who won the week, and who controls the conversation, as opposed to the much more difficult, nuanced and crucial questions that remain operative irrespective of phony ideological labels....
[D]itching the bogus left-right frame is not about moving reflexively to the center. It is rather a rejection of the very concept that left, right and center are a good way to map the crucial debates of the day.... I want my reporters to reject the false idea that you simply poll people at both extremes of any issue, then paint a line down the middle and point to it as reality. We have to reject the tired notion that objectivity means the reader can get all the way to the bottom of the story and not know what to think....
[O]bjectivity means that we conduct a fully open-minded inquiry. We do not begin our reporting with a fully-formed position. We do not adhere to the contentions of one think tank or political party or government organ as truth. We don't write to please our friends or sources or interest groups. Rather, we do our own reporting, our own independent thinking, our own scrutinizing. But at the end of that process, we offer a conclusion, and transparently so, with whatever caveats are in order. We do not concern ourselves with how others may describe our place on the ideological spectrum, and we do not hold back when we know something, or lard up our journalism with disingenuous counter-quotes to cover ourselves against the charge that we staked out a position. As long as our process is pure, so is the work.
And this sort of objectivity is the real argument for diversity in newsrooms -- the need to ensure that we have people in place who can tell a greater range of stories, so that we collectively see and understand the breadth of the American experience.... [N]o ideological position can be counted on to deliver the facts, and any journalism that loses track of this ultimately reduces itself to a version of propaganda. Verifiable truth is our master, the one element that does not change when a new party takes over in Washington, when a new fashion sweeps the country, or a fresh approach prevails on university campuses...
Bill Keller's claim about what Peter Goodman wrote:
Traditional News Outlets: [J]ust as doctors and lawyers, teachers and military officers, judges and the police are expected to set aside their own politics in the performance of their duties, so are our employees. This does not mean — as one writer recently scoffed — that we “poll people at both extremes of any issue, then paint a line down the middle and point to it as reality.” It does not mean according equal weight to every point of view, no matter how far-fetched. (Sorry, birthers, but President Obama is an American citizen.) Impartiality is, for us, not just a matter of pretending to be neutral; it is a healthful, intellectual discipline. Once you proclaim an opinion, you may feel an urge to defend it, and that creates a temptation to overlook inconvenient facts when you should be searching them out.
In short, our mission is not to tell you what we think or what you are supposed to think, and it is certainly not to pander to your prejudices. It is to supply to you, as best we can, the basis to make up your own minds.
As partisan “news” sites have proliferated and the country has grown more polarized, there is sometimes pressure on journalists to abandon the effort to be impartial, to openly take a side and to write accordingly.... To me that is like saying that because much of our children’s future is ordained by genetics, we should abandon the effort to be good parents. Impartial journalism, like child-rearing, is an aspiration, but it is a worthy one.
It is unclear whether Keller did not spend enough time reading Goodman to understand what he was saying, or understood damned well and decided to misrepresent Goodman anyway.
