A Journalism Manifesto

Mainstream journalists are being torn apart. Conservatives long have accused reporters and editors for big newspapers, magazines and television of having liberal biases. More recently, liberals have hounded journalists for pandering to conservatives and America's social elite. Both conservatives and liberals depict journalists as craven careerists, more concerned with maintaining their own privilege than getting stories right or serving the national interest.

I've been a journalist for more than 25 years and have worked for two of the most powerful media organizations in the country, Dow Jones and Time Inc. I've written for some of the smallest publications in the country, from weekly newspapers to small opinion peddlers. I've taught journalism at leading universities for seven years. Everywhere, I've met talented and principled people who want the best for their readers. Yet I must concede that critics of conventional journalism are correct on nearly all counts.

Trying to be fair and balanced, journalists have failed their subjects and themselves. In seeking to stand above the fray, journalists have denied the obvious. They have robbed themselves of credibility. They are getting torn to pieces fighting the wrong battles.

Technology bears some of the blame. In the good old days, a pack of journalists could enter into a secret pact. All reported the same essential facts, drawing on the same people and coming to the same conclusions. The uniformity reports benefited journalists by taking the risk out of their jobs. No one looked bad.

The internet demolished the journalism herd, driving holes into the fraternity's defenses and exposing most journalists as poorly prepared, fearful of making grievous errors and reading from a brief and superficial script. Blogs and other forms of "citizen" journalism can never replace the breadth and quality of professional journalism, but the immediate effect of this torrent reportage has been to destroy the credibility of mainstream journalism.

The myth of balance

Professional journalists can restore their status only by taking radical action. They are getting torn to pieces fighting the wrong battles. Journalists keep telling critics that they are committed to hearing all sides. That they are committed to "objectivity," which in practical terms means giving ink and airtime to various viewpoints in a fair and even detached way. This so-called balance is supposed to translate into the all-important objectivity.

Veteran journalists know that the objectivity ethos is the "big lie" of their profession. Actually, journalists are beholden to various points of view, and their commitment to balance is a convenient way of not talking about the rat's nest of commitments, concerns, biases and passions that animate the life of every good journalist and most of the bad ones.

Commercial pressures also force journalists to choose sides, to root for one outcome over another, to seek out some sources and never even speak to others. Professional values, meanwhile, force journalists to routinely rule out certain points of view, notably those deemed "irresponsible" or "out of the mainstream." In a world of complexity, journalists cannot square the circle; they cannot smooth the rough edges of reality.

Partisan journalism is thus not an aberration but an ideal. Today, this ideal is never professed and instead confusingly denied. Openly taking sides is a necessary but not sufficient condition to reform journalism.

The field is under not only ideological attack but also economic attack. The internet has forced a transformation in the mentality and tactics of advertisers, and both newspapers and magazines are only now starting to feel the negative effects of this transformation. Larger traumas are still to come as the internet grows more firmly entrenched as an information and advertising medium.