Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

"Transparency works better than reprimands. I'd rather know a reporter's views so I can understand where the journalist is coming from and can compensate for those views if they affect the journalist's writing."

David, note we had an instructive demonstration of just how well this works in practice, with the "FEC cracking down on *blogging*" hype. How many people stopped and thought "Hey, this journalist is absolutely notorious for being an agenda-driven hack, who writes scare-mongering articles, and he's "interviewing" a fellow ideologue who has been riding this hobby-horse for *years*"?

Some people did, granted. But it sure wasn't as common a reaction as it should have been if "transparency" really worked as advertised.

I understand the theory. But as a factual matter, I think it works in practice about as well as saying "People get what they deserve, the great cosmic wheel of karma deals out fairness and justice". It doesn't necessarily happen :-(.

The opposite view just might be right. Not because journalists are priests. But because cutting down on any incentive to draw them into partisan alliances is arguably, *FACTUALLY*, a good idea.

This applies to those of us not journalists too - actually across the board in any profession. People have the right to interact in the civic sphere and not have it automatically reflect back onto their employer, and/or not have their employer proactively try to prevent them from civic interactions out of fear that something might bounce back on them. Doesn't Hiawatha Bray have the right to wear his "I'm an individual now" hat?

This isn't solely a problem of the internet by any means, but the internet makes a person's private and public lives less separable. We need to evolve a new way of dealing with the fact that people, even those entrusted with positions in the public sphere, are also citizens (a la Lisa Williams's concept of internet-forced societal maturity etc.). Yeah, I know I'm ranting to the choir. :)

Someone pointed out though that Bray was, in effect, using his Globe-reporter credibility to give his blogging more weight.

I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's worth thinking about.

One more reason to work for yourself.

Agree with Seth on the practicality challenge of tracking every reporter's personal views. I check in on JOHO every so often, and I don't even know David's views on everything. He likes blogs. He voted for Kerry. He advised Dean. Jerome Armstrong wasn't sure about that, according to Andrew Orlowski, who maybe is biased because he doesn't like blogs. David's response. I'm confused.

As to the issues at hand:
"impartiality expected of journalists" == "appearance of impartiality".

Nowhere did Chinlund say that readers confused Bray's personal writing for Globe writing. It's that he was so venal in his writing. You wouldn't see see writing like this in a major paper. So now, whenever I read Bray, I might think, "Strip away the editing, and he's really a hack."

Yes, the newspapers engage in a fiction, if you will, that what we read is not really what the author would write if they could. But our world is full of such fictions, and we get along by not having any angst over it. There's even a bigger fiction when a talking head on any derivative of The McLaughlin Group is perceived as the truth since we see them on television without editor-- when, quite often, they are hamming it up for the sake of argument and the sake of entertainment.

We out here in reader-land simply do not have time for the unvarnished truth all the time. We have to trust the varnish for areas outside our expertise.

"Transparency is as good as sunlight."

Amen to that Brother.

I like the slogan, but in a wordier, perhaps more precise mode, isn’t the point that if you can’t have objectivity, then the best fallback isn’t the pretense of objectivity, but one’s best efforts at transparency?

As you point out, if we know that Bray supports Bush fervently, that helps us read his coverage of telcos with appropriate critical leverage.

Biblical scholars hang on to the shreds of objectivity almost as fervently as do journalists, for similar reasons, I suppose. As in journalism so in biblical scholarship, the better and more intellectually honest approach would entail putting our ideological cards on the table, and letting our readers discern the extent to which our efforts to transcend our prejudices actually succeed — rather than concealing our prejudices and insisting, “Trust me, this one’s objective.”