Whap! Whap!

Newspaper editors love to rail against anonymous postings on the internet.

Here, for example, is what Tim McGuire of Arizona State University said this week: “It’s time for newspapers and every other adult working on the web to realize and admit that we are not fostering democracy when we encourage and enable vicious, anonymous comments.”

It’s a small excerpt from a lengthy article that makes many fine points. You can read it here. But making other good points can’t erase this very bad one.

I truly wish people would be civil on the web, talk radio and everywhere else. But anonymous speech is still speech. It still has value… I truly wish people would be civil on the web, talk radio and everywhere else. But anonymous speech is still speech. It still has value and it still deserves protection.

The argument also is deeply hypocritical coming from newspaper editors, who every day hide behind anonymous editorials and a barrage of anonymous sources. Freedom of the press, A.J. Liebling is said to have written, belongs to those who own one. Editors such as Mr. McGuire want to keep it that way. We’ll decide, they say, who gets to express an opinion and whether or not they can do so anonymously.

Demanding that people identify their opinions publicly is a form of intimidation. Nothing more. It’s why we hold anonymous voting so sacred.

I am glad that the internet allows me to be read the unfiltered hate speech of groups I detest (many of who hide behind anonymity). Those people are acting on their hateful opinions anonymously every time they walk into a voting booth. I like having them out in the open so I can try to understand where the hatred is coming from.

Having run anonymous forums at a newspaper for many years, I definitely did not like the sometimes vicious comments people sometimes posted about me. At the same time, I found it educational to know that things I did or said, however innocently, could be interpreted as being malicious. Had I demanded identification I might have protected myself from these slurs, but I wouldn’t have done anything to prevent people from being angry at me and I wouldn’t have learned anything from their anger.

I wrote a column about these anonymous postings at the time, because the paper’s editor was demanding names be made public. In it, I pointed out that the vast majority of postings were not hateful, and some were very uplifting. In the column, I asked if anyone knew the original author of the Golden Rule. I got dozens of responses, almost every one citing a different source.

Nearly everyone agreed, however, that what people say is more important than who says it.

p.s. Soon after that column, the paper got burned by a frequent letter writer who often espoused what I considered to be offensive ideas. He was published because he didn’t so anonymously.  He had a name, which made it OK. Only it turns out the name he was using wasn’t his own. He was in reality the top aide of a Republican legislator. A top aide who was sometimes quoted anonymously in news columns. So much for accountability.

The San Diego Reader takes a look at the fall of the right-wing Copley Empire. Certainly doesn’t bolster the argument that newspapers are losing ground because of liberal leanings …

Nick Denton writes on Gawker that the New York Times should admit that the line between news and opinion is blurry. The paper is not objective, he says.

I agree completely. And I disagree totally.

I agree that the New York Times is not objective. That is not, however, as Mr. Denton suggests, the result of some policy change specific to the Times. No newspaper, in fact no reporter, is objective, because objectivity is impossible. I remember a line from a book on scientific objectivity from my college days: Inherent in any observation is an aetiology and a prognosis.

Where Mr. Denton and I really disagree, however, is in his sweeping conclusion: “The newspaper’s proprietors and editors are obviously moderate liberals, and the conservative columnists are either watered-down or compromised, as token as the useless liberals allowed to whine on Fox News—but the Times can’t acknowledge that it’s partisan.”

The paper is obviously liberal! And Mr. Denton offers a stunning array of evidence to support this dubious conclusion. Some examples: The paper’s coverage of Heath Ledger’s death and its attacks Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and on Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. Liberal? In fact, none of his examples is remotely liberal, ranging from non-partisan sensationalism to a deeply conservative bias. But to Mr. Denton, it all adds up to an obvious liberal bias.

His comment about opinion columnists is equally dubious. Conservatives are watered-down and compromised? Where? How? David Brooks and Maureen Dowd are hardly watered down. I’m not suggesting that the Times opinion columns are overwhelmingly conservative, not with Frank Rich, Paul Krugman and others, but they certainly are not overwhelmingly liberal.

Paul Krugman and Frank Rich both proudly wave the liberal flag, but Brooks and Dowd don’t similarly wave the conservative flag. Perhaps that gives the appearance of liberal bias, but it’s acknowledged liberal bias, which is what Mr. Denton is calling for. It’s the conservative bias that isn’t acknowledged.

Worse, Mr. Denton laments the bias in news coverage. The Times’ incessant cheerleading for the Bush administration in its news coverage leading up to the Iraq War by Judith Miller and others can hardly be construed as liberal. That coverage warmed the hearts of even the most-ardent neocon, but I don’t know that liberals were similarly entranced by the Times’ suggestion of a Heath Ledger-Mary Kate Olsen connection, which Mr. Denton uses several times to support his charge of liberal bias.

But the Times ran a news story about John McCain and his ties to a lobbyist. Liberal bias! Except it ran a Page 1 attack piece on Barack Obama, with Deval Patrick as proxy, on Page 1 at about the same time.

So you’re right, Mr. Denton.

And oh, so totally mistaken.

Newspapers are publishing, as fact, the opinion that the production of ethanol is responsible for rising food and energy prices and for a looming environmental nightmare.

Rarely if ever does a newspaper publish, as fact or opinion, the opinions that the cost of the Iraq War should be added to the true cost of a gallon of gasoline, that beef consumption is responsible for high food prices, or that cutting trees for newspapers is an environmental disaster.

I understand the arguments against ethanol, and many of them make sense., although there are counter arguments to all of them that also make sense. There are equally compelling arguments for each of the issues I raised in the second paragraph. So why is the argument in the first paragraph accepted as fact and those in the second considered opinion? I think it boils down to politics. (more…)

Listen to the drumbeat from media pundits about Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.

The Chicago Tribune, Tim Russert, Maureen Dowd and most of the rest of the fair and balanced press corps argue that if the constant negative coverage of Obama-Wright doesn’t stop soon, Obama’s campaign is going to suffer. Is that a promise or a threat?

There is only one way to stop the attacks against Wright and Obama. It’s for the people making them to stop making them. That means you, Chicago Tribune, Tim Russert, Maureen Dowd, et al. They could end this debacle today.

But they don’t. Why? Polls suggest the public cares very little about the “controversy.”

Think about the corollary: What if these pundits said “If we ever start comparing John McCain to his controversial and unpopular supporter, George W. Bush, he’s going to be in trouble. What if we led every op-ed page, every broadcast, every letters to the editor page with constant negative coverage of this relationship? What would happen to McCain’s campaign?”

The irony is that the public, by far, considers McCain-Bush a bigger problem than Obama-Wright. There’s good reason to think that if the “liberal” media turned their attack against McCain, his campaign would be toast. But far from playing up the near mirror-image relationship between the two, the press continues to try to protect McCain with absurd articles about what a maverick he is.

Editors and publishers wonder why readers think they’re full of crap. There are many reasons we think that. The fact that they’re far to the right of mainstream thought is one big one.

The Washington Post bills one of its columnists, Steven Pearlstein, as a liberal. That’s pretty liberal when a “liberal” paper deems one of its own worthy of an extra liberal in front of his name, right?

Maybe. Let’s look at the liberal agenda Mr. Pearlstein is pushing lately: There are too many locally owned papers. Too many news organizations. Too many. Further, there’s too much local news in these too-plentiful papers.

Perhaps he will be happy when all news is controlled by News Corp., GE and Disney. God knows the neocons will be.

His liberal arguments?

Pay will go up when there’s more consolidation in the newspaper industry, just like it has in the retail indust … oh, wait …

Yeah, but consumer satisfaction will soar, just like it has in the banking industr … ummmmm ….

OK, but there’s no argument that “efficiency” and “sophistication” will improve. That has happened in every industry.

Take the finance industry that Mr. Pearlstein covers. Can you imagine how inefficient things would have been if the mortgage business had been left to a bunch of unsophisticated local-yokel bankers? It took years of consolidation to get to the point where a handful of sophisticated bankers at the Carlyle Group, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, etc, could create a global credit crisis so efficiently. If we had left it up to a bunch of dumb old underpaid local bankers in Forest Grove and Nampa and Saginaw, none of this would have happened.

If Wal-Mart hadn’t come along, Main Streets in Forest Grove, Nampa and Saginaw might have been clogged with locally owned stores. Worse yet, local newspapers might have been clogged with ads from those local stores. Eeewwww, how tacky that would be.

So Mr. Pearlstein is shilling for the Bush Administration’s FCC and Commerce Department.

And the liberal media labels him “liberal.”

Real liberals don’t have a chance.

The thought came to me while reading this essay by Frank Furedi that seemingly has nothing to do with newspapers. Then again, I think it has everything to do with newspapers.

Furedi is writing about 1968, but look at today. The rich and powerful, including newspaper publishers and columnists, are quick to find scapegoats (gays who want to marry, Mexicans who want to eke out a living, Jerry Springer, drug addicts, etc.) to carry the blame for all of society’s ills. Powerful conservative Republicans for many years controlled Congress, the White House and much of the judiciary, but blamed their failure to solve problems on the weak, demoralized “Liberals” who controlled nothing.

Within the industry, publishers and columnists turned their wrath outward. The industry’s problems were the result of readers who didn’t care about their communities, who were too stupid to appreciate the need for a daily newspaper, who were too cheap to promote their small businesses …

Everyone, it seems, is to blame for the decline of newspapers. Everyone, that is, except the rich and powerful who own and control them.

So the powerful can sip scotch at the country club and tsk-tsk at the rest of us. After all, it’s not their catastrophic failure to lead that is causing all the world’s problems.

It’s our failure to follow that’s to blame.

Todd Gitlin is keeping tabs on Tim Russert for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Todd Gitlin makes no secret of the fact that his politics are of the liberal variety. Tim Russert, on the other hand, blathers on about politics and pretends he is presenting just the facts. So Mr. Gitlin gets attacked for voicing an opinion about Mr. Russert’s facts.

Confused? So am I. I don’t see much fuss about conservative columnists attacking the supposed liberal bias of mainstream media. It seems that the liberal bias of newspapers is just a fact, so printing attacks on liberals is a way of balancing opinion. Conversely, liberals addressing what we see as a conservative bias are doing nothing more than proving the fact that we media types are liberal. Got it?

This post from myrtlebeachonline.com repeats the same old fantasies that we’ve been hearing from journalists for years, including these gems:

“The irony, of course, is that Huffington Post, just as most independent Internet sites, relies on stories filed by newspaper and television reporters. Without them, Huffington Post is just blowing so much smoke.”

Really? I read the Huffington Post and other websites because they’re full of stories and perspectives I never see in newspapers.

“Anyone who thinks mainstream newspapers are biased has only to spend a little time with Huffington Post to understand what bias truly is.”

Of course the Huffington Post is biased. Who said it isn’t? Interesting, though, that he focuses on the Huffington Post and not the Drudge Report, etc. … The difference is that on the internet the biases are more readily apparent and we can jump from bias to bias, unlike newspapers, where we’re spoon-fed biases by editors who obviously are “objective.”

“That kind of partisanship recalls 18th and 19th century journalism, when newspapers existed to promote the agendas of political parties and made little attempt at objectivity.”

See! Proves my point: Editors are objective! Seriously, the historical reference fails to note that even in small towns in those days there were options newspaper readers don’t have today. Not to defend yellow journalism, but where there was a Republican paper you usually could pass it by for the Democratic paper. And who says those times ended in the 19th century? Papers proudly promote political agendas today, from shilling for the war to promoting local developers. If I disagree with the editors I can write a letter, which will be published (in a highly edited form) only if those same objective editors decide it’s an acceptable opinion. Promoting an agenda is not inherently bad. In fact it’s often what makes newspapers fun and worthwhile. But stop pretending that newspapers are objective.

None of this nonsense from a little faraway website is particularly important, except that I came across it only through links from sites designed for newspaper journalists. My concern is that this drivel continues to be considered insightful in the world of newspaper think tanks. It’s this kind of arrogant, delusional thinking that is destroying newspapers and pushing us to the internet for our news and information.

The author laments that young people don’t read newspapers. He should consider himself lucky they don’t, because if they did they would shake their heads and laugh at the silly old men who write for them.

Newspaper journalist argue their job is to interpret events and make sense of them to readers. This interpretation is often so predictable, there’s no need for it.

Barack Obama, we’re told, is elitist. He called small-town folks bitter and made a lot of money last year. He’s elitist. Hillary Clinton is an elite former Wal-Mart board member, despite her blue-collar upbringing. John McCain, on the other hand, grew up wealthy, married into enormous wealth, but we’re told he has the common touch. George Bush is a hard-working rancher, despite his New England, Ivy League, billionaire background. And then there’s the Pope …

Search Google news for references to Pope Benedict as “humble” and similar adjectives. You could spend all day reading how reporters interpreted his trip to America as a visit of a humble, gentle, man of the people.

This is a man who lives in a palace, flies to the U.S. on a private luxury jet and spends his time dictating from his ivory tower to the less-fortunate how they should live their lives.

None of that makes him a bad person. But it certainly doesn’t give in much in common with the common man. Yet journalists feel secure in reciting this absurd generalization as though it’s a simple fact.

Do we really benefit from this sort of “interpretation”?