The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. said Tuesday he thought Americans were tired of the vitriolic quarrels that play out between party hacks and pundits here in our bleak 21st century.
News media in the last generation have taught us to scorn any ideology that cannot fit on a bumper sticker
Pitts said. We've had our attention spans truncated and our vocabularies halved by vicious debate and that modern scourge, the media.
Pitts said cable networks' emphasis on the fringes -think Bush and Kerry representatives barking at each other on Hannity and Colmes -was behind our national inability to address each other politely. But he also said he thought the media would clean up its act when consumers tired of it; if people didn't like vituperation, they wouldn't watch Fox or CNN. But this seems like a backward way of looking at it. If people didn't want vituperation, the extensively focus-grouped media wouldn't provide it.
It was disappointing to see Pitts, whose columns are sterling and whose comments are incisive, join that most fashionable of contemporary clubs, the Disenfranchised Press Critics. Almost everyone's a member now -you probably are, too. Anyone with a political opinion inveighs on the bias in today's media which most people describe as an enormous corporate monolith that speaks with two voices, left or right, and is responsible for all our modern ills.
(If you're a Disenfranchised Press Critic, here's a tip for the next time you rail against the liberal or conservative media: Never criticize a newspaper editorial page for being biased because this will immediately reveal you as a bush leaguer. This is the most common and most moronic complaint; opinion pages are supposed to be biased.)
Another news professional in Athens on Tuesday was asked about this media question. Columbus Dispatch senior editor Joe Hallett said he didn't like being lumped in with the TV or radio people, who attract a lot of scorn for how breezily or acridly they do their jobs. The electronic media give print people a bad name, he said, most of whom try to report fairly and comprehensively. Many Disenfranchised Press Critics will agree to this point, and acknowledge they understand the difference between TV and newspapers, reportage and opinion copy: Oh
well
I hate The New York Times editorials
they say, but I respect their news pages. As it should be.
Here in Dick Cheney's America, the problem is not just that an army of weekend warriors has decided that only their cable network -Fox News, perhaps, or CNN -reports gospel and the other blasphemy. The problem is that news directors and editors and reporters across the country are caught up in the resultant identity crisis. We in the news game can't seem to get over this bias question, and it's hurting the business.
Longstanding professional canons mandate that reporters do their best to report the news objectively, so in a climate where unhappy viewers or readers cry bias all the time, journalists tend to
get a little gun shy. The American media are psychotically
self-aware now; thumb-suckers have created a cottage industry out of assailing or defending them.
We need to get past this. The savvy politicos who first exploited the bias argument -to fire back at journalists who reported facts that embarrassed them -doubtlessly are pleased at the monster they created. To modern politicians, journalism doesn't represent an independent push back to government power, but instead a parasitic group that somehow gets its jollies from camping out in hearing rooms and city halls. But most journalists, this one included, aspire to serve the public by finding the truth and reporting it.
At no point did anyone claim reporters were perfect or their news organizations operated flawlessly. But howling liberal! because CBS News wants to air the names of all the soldiers killed in Iraq dodges the central questions of the day -war and peace in Iraq, terrorism, etc. -and instead puts a gun to the head of the messenger. In America we have too long dodged real debate by battering the poor messenger.
-Philip Ewing is The Post's managing editor. Send him an e-mail at philip.ewing@ohiou.edu.
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