Boviosity!

I had a breakthrough in my thinking about "Liberal Journalists" over the last couple days. It started with a post on OTLM regarding the "Outraged 9/11 Families" flap (Journalists permitted themselves to be used as a conduit for expressing outrage at Bush by groups that had previously endorsed or even more strongly supported John Kerry. It was a whole thing.) It's probably been stated better before, but here's another way to look at it.

There's no set way to write any story for a journalist. He can take any tack at any moment and satisfy his brief to his employer: to present a story with relevant facts. Similarly, no newspaper can present every story in the world, and no Journalist can present every fact, or even every relevant fact, surrounding an incident. So the newspaper presents what it hopes its readers will be interested in, and to a certain extent, so does the Journalist. But the Journalist has less responsibility directly to the reader, in that he is just one person (with stringers and editors, but work with me here) who is tracking down a story. And how does he go about tracking down the story? By observing, and by asking questions. And how does he know what questions to ask? There's the rub: there's no set list of questions to ask, nor any hard rule about whom to ask them. The "five W's" are a good starting point but are by no means a complete guide. No, it's the Journalist's curiosity that best serves the well-written story. And in the case of the story you're referring to, and in the case of the "outraged 9/11 families" story, the possibility of getting outside information on the people who adhere to his worldview just naturally doesn't ping his curiosity meter.

Does the Journalist have a responsibility to reach outside his normal curiosity zone? I think so, but really, how can he? Bloggers caught the manufactured "outraged 9/11 families" because they were curious and, yes, had an axe to grind. Presented with the commercials, how would a Journalist who supports W in his heart have approached the issue of the 9/11 images? Who would he have called for comment?

Journalists need to realize that when they're reflexively challenging some position or following up on someone's statement, it's probably because they're predisposed to disagree with that position. Then they need to figure out how to challenge positions they agree with. Or, alternatively, they need to drop the pretense of impartiality. They're only human. They need to stop pretending to us that they're something wholly other.