The “objective” press: it’s bigger than Ifill
By now you probably know that Gwen Ifill, moderator of tonight’s VP debate, has a book coming out right after the election entitled “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” This means she stands to profit monetarily from an Obama victory—not to mention the fact that she, like so many other journalists, is apparently simpatico with his politics anyway.
Ifill sniffs derisively at the idea that this could in any way compromise her integrity and cool objectivity:
I’ve got a pretty long track record covering politics and news, so I’m not particularly worried that one-day blog chatter is going to destroy my reputation,” Ifill told the Associated Press. “The proof is in the pudding. They can watch the debate tomorrow night and make their own decisions about whether or not I’ve done my job.”
Hey, that’s me; Ms. Blog Chatter herself. But I’m actually not out to destroy Ms. Ifill’s reputation, which I assume is just fine. I would like, however, to give her and her colleagues a few words of advice and counsel.
There is something called judgment and disclosure. At some point before the news came out about this book, Ms. Ifill should have had the judgment to tell whatever person or persons chose her for this gig that she was writing such a work. If she didn’t volunteer the information herself, she should have been asked about possible conflicts of this sort. If she wasn’t, there was poor judgment on the part of the vetters as well.
But it doesn’t surprise me at all. Most members of the press hold to a self-serving fiction about themselves: that they are able to be coldly objective in giving us the news, no matter how partisan their views and no matter how badly they may want candidate X or Y or Z to be elected.
Some say that it’s really okay because Ms. Ifill will now bend over backwards to show she’s not biased against Ms. Palin. That’s not a solution, because it runs the risk of an overcorrection. And Ms. Ifill’s blithe suggestion that we just watch and see doesn’t help either, for two reasons: by the time we could make this judgment the damage would be done, and most observers are not necessarily aware of the subtle forms such bias can take.
Absolute objectivity is a myth, and not just for the press. It is (or should be) a goal, however. For example, I try very hard to look at the facts with a cold eye, putting aside my wishes and hopes, and trying to judge as though I had no stake in the matter. But I also know that I’m only human, and that such a goal can never quite be reached. I must acknowledge that despite my best efforts I can be biased in ways of which I’m not even aware. Those in the press who think they can be truly objective are guilty of self-deception, or of deceiving the public if they know they cannot and pretend otherwise.
But there is a remedy. Everyone who reads this blog can judge me—or any other blogger—as to my objectivity and my logic, and make their own judgments about whether my arguments are persuasive. That is because I am upfront about my political point of view.
In the case of journalists, the problem is far more serious. They reach a much wider audience in a far more influential way. But what is even more dangerous is that their pretense of objectivity—and their belief that they actually attain it (which may in some cases be a true belief and in others a cynical pose)—is deeply misleading.
I would much prefer a journalism that takes into account and openly acknowledges pre-existing biases. Newspapers should state upfront whether they are liberal or conservative, and not leave it to the naive reader to figure it out, which many never do. Same for journalists, if the paper or magazine for which they work has a mix of writers from both sides. Same for TV stations, same for all the news—and the same for the moderators of debates.
Actually, since no one is truly objective, perhaps there should be two moderators for each debate who alternate asking the questions. Of course, each moderator should nevertheless attempt to be as objective as possible. But with a questioner from each side, there would be an upfront acknowledgment and disclosure of the problems inherent in the entire enterprise. The viewer would be informed, and we all would not have to rely so heavily on the impossible-to-achieve “objectivity” of a single Gwen Ifill—or any other journalist, Left or Right.
The greatest debates of all time the Lincoln Douglas debates had no moderator and perhaps the ideal format. One speaker lead off with a speech of decent length and then the other responded and then the first speaker came back.
The candidates got to set the tone with a prepared speech, and then to respond with long answers.
If we did this today, how different it would be. The candidate whose opening was vapid would immediately be beaten up by the opponent and the public. No external moderator could steer the course. Now Lincoln lost the election, but won the ultimate contest as his arguments were not political trimming like Douglas, but more fundmental and real. Maybe that’s why no one seems to have done this again!
The press was rabidly partisan but that happened after the debates.
What kind of person does it take to get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and keep on eating? I can’t even begin to understand these liberal hominids and their seething contempt for all things fair and just.
Dave Moelling: it can’t happen today because the press has to mark its territory. It’s really all about them, see.
This is the grossest conflict of interest I can imagine, and the nonchalant way it seems to be accepted — by McCain, as well as others — shocks and dismays me, and adds to the growing sense I’ve had recently that things are coming unmoored.
I grew up in the fifties in a college town that was almost entirely Democratic and liberal. The notion of “conflict of interest” was perhaps the first ethical category I understood, so attuned were my parents and their friends to this concept. My mother was the president of the League of Women Voters. She made me a brilliant witch costume for Halloween but I could not win a prize at the League-sponsored pageant because — all together now — it would involve a Conflict of Interest. By age eight I understood the tricky business about how a C of I need not involve a real conflict, only the PERCEPTION of one. And so it continued, all through my growing-up years. This exquisite attention to procedural fairness seemed a hallmark of liberalism and the Democratic party. And actually was, I think.
I wonder what my parents, both dead for many years now, would make of this debate.
mizpants: it’s a very slippery slope, is it not? Notions such as conflict of interest have to be taught, just as they were to you. If the grownups don’t care about it, the kids won’t. If our “watchdog” press not only doesn’t care, but decides to ignore the whole thing itself when it suits its purposes, children grow up not even understanding the concept, much less supporting it (or they only support it when it serves their interests).
Your parents were old-fashioned in their values, as are we. It’s a Brave New World, I’m afraid.
I absolutely agree with this post. I make my own biases as up front as possible, but when objectivity is appropriate I strive for it as much as I can. This isn’t liberal vs. conservative here; it’s us against the media. That’s why we bloggers are so wonderful… The internet is helping to break the chokehold of corporate television. I can’t personally claim to have broken much news -certainly not beyond a local level- I have witnessed amazing reporting my Alaska bloggers covering the gamut of issues and non-issues surrounding Palin. The debate had better be fun.
I was a reporter some years ago, and worked with pretty smart and ethical colleagues. On the medium to big American papers, the best editors knew what objectivity was, and how to get it. The slogan was: “Objectivity is slanting the news both ways.”
What does that imply? It implies there is no single viewpoint that is objective, nor any kind of unslanted news. It implies that the reporter will be able to see at least two sides to each story. Sometimes there will be more. That he will clearly get both viewpoints on “the news” he’s reporting into the story.
The goal is this: no story is based on one viewpoint. So single-sourced stories are bad. The goal is that every viewpoint inside a story is represented fairly enough that the holders of that viewpoint would say, “Yeah, that’s a pretty fair statement of what we believe.”
This requires a good deal of work. Sometimes it’s hard to find the opposition on an issue or a news story. But a news story that has no disagreement in it about what the events mean is not worth much.
Often, on ideological papers like the Boston Globe, one side of a story gets the bulk of the quotes…and the opposition gets a token one-sentence appearance in the story.
With regards to Gwen Ifill, if she represents the viewpoints of the people who oppose her behavior…and does so in a way that seems accurate to those people…that will be good. She needs to say, “Some people believe that I will profit if Barack O is elected and lose money if he is not. They believe those economic facts should have moved me to recuse myself. They believe the appearance of conflict of interest harms the public debate, and they have asked me not to moderate this event. I will indeed sell more books, most likely, if BO is elected than if he loses. However, I intend to set my own concerns about profit aside and ask questions as if I did not have a book coming out on January 20th.”
Anyone think she’ll say that? One can hope, but I fear that the American commitment to fairness becomes less and less common.
wow, all longer posts than me… i must have enteres the twilight zone…
her behavior fits leftist behavior.
the presumtion of the end justifies the means..
this translates in this sphere as
win by any means…
and so she doesnt see being honorable as a means of winning and being in place. in fact, the left sees these things as just weaknesses that those with empathy use to justify giving up.
its the difference between the sub clinical sub criminal sociopath/psychopath.
the sociopath has no real morals (used to be called moral imbicility), and so they dont know what is right or wrong.. they do know what others have decied is right or wrong, but to them this is often some arbitrary, and fo them, leads too many occaisions that one doesnt get to do or have what one wants.
to a moral person who lives by these ideals, one must disclose conflicts. to the normal, when one discloses such, it gives a chance for people to use the honesty as a guage for whether an exception should be made. however it also gives a chance for people to decide its not good, so lets err on caution and not let it happen.
for a sociopath with a goal, why should they risk not being the one when they have the chance? its represents power, history, etc… so why should she risk being a side note in history rather than the man subject? narcisistic sociopathy?
anyway…
to accomplish this, she follows the sociopathic rule that its easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.
and to such a power sociopath, asking permission is subjugation, and so she wont do that.
she would rather it remained secret, let it happen, then say… oh, i am sorry… like a immoral lawyer that says something they sholdnt and then gets striked from the record she knows it will still be in peoples minds.
she is a woman on a dual mission, for her keepers and for herself.
nothing will be allowed to get in the way of that, after all, alinsky taught the same kind of win by any means methods…
the left thinks this is superior, but the hubris and such of a sociopath is what usually reveals them and gets them caught, as well as causes their plans to often fail as they have little self control to close the deal.
right now i am wondering why the current vote hasnt been blus slipped.
Let Gwen ask Sarah questions and Ann Coulter ask Biden questions. Fair and balanced
Okay- if Ann’s too radical, how about Rush?
Not to put too fine a point on it.
If Obama wins, Ifil’s book, to be released January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day, will probably net Ifil tens of thousands and. conceivably,y hundreds of thousands of dollars but, if it is McCain who is sworn in on that day, Ifil’s book will be of much less interest and could quickly end up remaindered or pulped and Ifil would likely get much less money, perhaps very little at al,l when compared to what she could have reasonably expected to get if Obama were elected.
If this isn’t a glaring, major, totally disqualifying reason for Ifil to put her thumb on the scale in favor of Biden, I don’t know what is. I would say “she should be ashamed of herself” but shame seems to be a totally inoperative mechanism with these people.
! Excellent piece on Sarah here
http://www.redstate.com/diaries/redstate/2008/oct/02/sarah-palin-and-the-integrity-gap/
Artfldgr, I take issue with calling Machiavellianism “leftist.” Taking the ends to justify the means is a principle adopted by many different people in many different situations.
Paul Moore- comparing Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh to Gwen Ifill is about the most insulting thing I’ve heard said about anyone today. Ifill indeed has a conflict of interest here and very likely is a big Obama supporter, but she’ll try to be objective, at least on the outside. Coulter/Limbaugh wouldn’t know objectivity if it slapped them in the face. If you could find a real liberal equivalent to either of them, by all means your idea would be great. Gwen is a reporter, though, not someone whose livelihood is based on opinion.
Coulter reminds me a lot of Mike Moore
Ifill deliberately withheld information about a major conflict of interest. She has proven her dishonesty.
Peter the Alaskan Kid says Ifill has a conflict of interest superimposed on her demonstrable bias (noticed what she has said about Palin lately?) but it is ok because, unlike Rush Limbaugh, she will be objective. I call BS. You are not the arbiter of who will be objective. We should not have to wonder if she will be objective.
John M’s conclusion does not surprise me. How often have media people have told us that “the appearance of corruption is what matters”? Clearly that only holds true for GOP politicians, but not for one of their own. I have been reading or hearing this theme since the story broke.
I said she would try to be objective or even just try to appear objective- not that she would be objective. Whatever- I thought we had already established that objectivity is impossible.
One of the interesting facts about Ms. Ifill is that her father was an Episcopal minister. Evidently, something was missing in her moral upbringing for this to happen. She was born the same year I was born (1955) and I learned in Catholic high school, in the Army, and in my higher education was a conflict of interest is. I don’t remember my parents ever imparting that lesson, but they never dealt with those kinds of issues in their lives, being hard working lower-middle class people who dealt with life in an honest way.
But I did learn a lot during my time on the Left about some of the kinds of people over that way. The ambitious ones all have an ethics of expediency, and there is nothing in the corpus of Marxist writings to disabuse one of that way of proceeding through life. Anything done in the furtherance of the cause of “social justice” is right and justified. Only the opponents of socialism are guilty of wrongdoing. One’s loyalties and social class determine where one is as a sinner. Now, a lot of these folks are well off – don’t kid yourselves. But because they are dedicated to advancing socialism, their lifestyles, their money, their positions, and their possessions do not indict them as enemies of the people. They don’t, as do members of Catholic religious orders, take a vow of poverty. As do the apparatchiks and loyal party members in socialist countries feel entitled to their perks, these people see themselves the same way.
Ms. Ifill exhibits the all to familiar behavior and attitudes of the very elites who feel most threatened by Sarah Palin. So, deep down they know the very corruption that rots their souls.
Peter the Alaskan Kid: exactly because objectivity is impossible, it behooves someone in Ifill’s position to reveal her conflict of interest and to refuse to be moderator because of it. Whether or not she or anyone else thinks she can be objective, or appear objective, despite her conflict of interest is not the point.
Someone tell “Peter the Alaskan Kid” that Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh would know what a conflict of interest is and when recusal is called for. And they are up front about their biases.
To “Peter the Alaskan Kid”
I used to be a revisionist Marxist intellectual many years ago, during my undergraduate and later during my seminary (Jesuit) years. I’ve studied philosophy and the broad historical sweep of the ideas from Classical Greece on down to contemporary philosophy, to include the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophers. I used to be an adherent of Liberation Theology, but very careful about who was most systematic in his approach, which is why I favored Juan Luis Segundo, S.J. Look him up. Take a gander at his work, it’s outstanding, especially his work “Faith and Ideologies.”
I left the Left in 1987. I did so because I came to realize that socialism is a very flawed system of thought, fundamentally flawed at the level of epistemology. It rests on premises about human beings that are not correct. As a system of economic thought (my B.A. was in Economics, minor in Philosophy; M.A. Philosophy, Loyola of Chicago; M.B.A. Finance, Boston College) it has spawned failure after failure. It does not work and cannot work. Furthermore, when one takes an honest look at how Marxist governments have behaved during the last century up to the present, the record is horrific. In fact, the evidence is damning. I spent about ten years of my life on the Left, from about age 22 to age 32. During that time, particularly early on, I turned a blind eye and refused to believe those truths. Gradually, as moments of cognitive dissonance piled up on my journey, I was compelled to take a hard look at the evidence and particularly how the inner logic of those various socialisms allowed the horrific malfeasance and inhumanity. In order to appreciate why that is important to me, I saw it as my task to, eventually as a theologian/philosopher, find a way around the very cutting criticisms of socialism coming from people like Michael Novak. I mention his name because, as a Catholic, knowing his theological education his opinion carried some weight as well as the weight of his own arguments. Human nature will not change because you rearrange the power structures or rules of exchange in society. At the very core of all socialist thought is a utopian project. It assumes some telos of human social and political achievement whereby heaven has been brought down to earth. It rests more on a kind of faith and hope which the facts about who we are do not warrant. I wanted to see if I could find a way around this, based on sound reasoning and having a scientific basis. I could find none. What I did find, the more I delved into psychology and neuroscience, was a darkness and flaws that are both organic and cosmic.
A thinker has to mature on many levels before he or she renders truly important contributions to the intellectual enterprise. I have followed, over the years since I left the Left in 1987, where socialist thought has been going. And in terms of evolving beyond where I had left off with it – it has not been evolving to take into consideration the important critiques of it and the scientific and medical research breakthroughs which really ought to dash utopian faith. Not one socialist has tried to address them. They are stuck in a time warp.
Furthermore, the current alliance of convenience which exists between the Left and its totalitarian fellow travelers in Islam (the oldest surviving totalitarian system) convinces me of the moral as well as intellectual rot that is at the core of Marxist thinking. I feel fortunate to have made the right choice to go back to the classical liberal traditions of our Anglo Saxon culture, rooted as it is in Christianity and Judaism. I have renewed my acquaintance with the works of Thomas Aquinas.
Socialist ethics has to be considered an ethics of expediency. And this is what you see at work when Gwen Ifill agreed to accept the job as moderator of tonight’s debate between Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden.
Palin just wrecked Biden:
Palin: “Freedom isn’t something we pass to our kids in their bloodstream; it’s something we fight for and something we teach them to fight for.”
“This is America. It is exceptional. It is the Shining City on the Hill, as Reagan said.”
Biden:
“Blah blah Bush”
“Blah blah Souplines”
“Blah blah Let’s lose the War….”
A done deal now that the debate is over, but a modest propsal: let Ifill write a book about John, Edwards.
Btw, at least in the bit I saw, Palin held her own as though she’d been doing this as long as Biden (who also seemed surprisingly human for a politician, I must say).
objectivity is not impossible…
there used to be a time when people would work out what would falsify their hypothesis… einstein did so, and so did many others.
objectivity can be obtained when one makes the effort to.
the fact that the rules are to tell things like books you write and what you believe, is one such effort.
yes the effort can be screwed with, but that doesnt mean that if one takes the effort, that one can get objectivity.
in african custom (of course not everywhere, and i dont remember the exact location), they invite a stranger in to decide their arguments. even if the stranger doesnt understand their language.
objectivity, like faith can be had with practice.
we dont practice this anymore. its like chivalry, and other things that stem out of wanting to reach for higher.
once science was formally drafted into the ideological war as an active combatant by people entering it for advocacy reasons to move agendas forward (and to hell with science, and facts, truth, and everything else).
claiming that there is scientific concensus on something is not scientific… it shows you that we have abandoned core principals.
even worse we lost that we could have absolute facts, and have objective views when we want to se the problems up to get that kind of answer (its harder to do this).
you measure how fast something falls, you get objective answers. even in other science areas, you can measure.. the problem is that people arent very thoughtful when they construct things as they are not taught to do that (that would stand in the way of ‘progress’).
math is pretty objective, so is physics, and even areas of biology. problems come when things are still being worked out and when they are still being interpreted, and when ideology forbids areas from being an answer (so false answers are invented in other areas as if the forbidden zone doesnt exist), and when money given is in the mix.
though by far ideology is the worst poison, it proscribes areas that answere are not allowed to be in, and it decides where all answers on a question must reside. it can result in some very bizare things that we seem to ignore or pretend to.
if we strive for it, we can acheive it. if another person was up moderating, then we would have thought that there would have been more objectivity. if we put a thousand questions in a machine and they were selected at random, we would have thought there was more objectivity.
if microphones were rigged so that they shut off and do not allow more time for one than another.
we CAN do things, we choose not to…
we claim there is no such thing, so why try?
you cant acheive something that doesnt exist. and if objectivity doesnt exist trying to be more objective is an impossibility. which direction would more objective be?
this is the pit that making everything relative and removing absolutes does. it confounds the VIEW of the world philosophically/ideologically with the View of the world as empiracle reality. the more to the philosophical we get the more plastic the world SEEMS as our minds adjust what we take in to realign the two.
an illustration is needed.
remember brian nichols? he was the big guy being escorted into court by Deputy Cynthia Hall. he basically punched her, took her gun, and then shot and killed three people and escaped. he hit cynthia so hard the hospital thought she had been shot in the face.
people had switched from using their empirical knowlege of the world to make a common sense choice, because they had switched in an ideological view of the world, in which certain premises are accepted as fact, and they lead to certain modes of choice as we seek not to violate those premises, ore even appear to.
so nichols a big guy was being escorted unchained and ready for court (thats another premise), by cynthia. why didnt nicholes get escorted by bubba the police officer that moonlights as a bouncer?
because we wont violate the ideological/philosophical premise that men and women are equal and diffferences are socially constructed.
if we live by an ideological.philosophical view (a relatively new invention i should add), then we have agreed not to be objective about the world, and so objectivity is dead. and no one ha the common sense any more to make incidents like nichols not happen, nor other things on other premises (like fat cats and run away greed with the state always being better if bigger).
note tha when nichols was captured, a woman escorted him into the jail, but she and he was surrounded by another ten large officers.
objectivity used to be a cultural goal of ours. of course we lose it when we have no culture to support the practice and train us in the thought and we start to try to live by the shortcut of ideollgy where a few easy to remember premises tell us how to act in all situations…
Cathy Young, the writer, once told me that she had come from a system (the Soviet) where ideology mattered more than the truth, and that she was afraid that’s where the US was headed. She said, in effect, “People can lose their radar for the truth, and not really be interested in what’s true any more.”
I’d argue that our current punishment by the markets for our widespread lying about loans and our ideological “thinking” about housing loans…is simply nature rolling over on us. Putting your head in the sand works just fine for a long while, and then not at all.