The Editor's Desk

Gah. Sometimes the culture of my own industry can drive me up the wall.

Every presidential cycle there’s a great rending of garments over how much participation journalists should be “allowed” in our country’s own political process.

The editor of the Denver Post sent out a memo listing who would and would not be allowed to participate in Colorado’s caucuses. The Rocky Mountain News has apparently prohibited journalists from participating in the caucuses entirely.

Caucuses are different from typical primaries because the votes are public tallies, so I understand the visual image of, say, your local news anchor standing around raising his hand for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

But on the other hand, so what? Here’s part of what Kelly McBride, an ethics expert for journalism think tank The Poynter Institute has to say about the matter:

“It’s a tough spot for the head of a newsroom to be in. You can’t prevent an employee from exercising a constitutional right. But you can minimize staffers’ involvement in political coverage if they have created a perception of bias or a conflict of interest. And if a significant portion of your staff can’t cover politics, can’t edit politics and can’t write headlines over political stories, that’s a problem too.

This might be a problem that’s peculiar to newsrooms in the United States, where news content (as opposed to opinion and editorial) remains free from political affiliation. It could be that someday we will move to something more like the European model, where many newsrooms reflect a political position.

I still think there’s value in a newsroom with a neutral point of view when it comes to politics. As long as neutrality is a value, it seems that caucuses and restrictive primaries will pose a difficult choice for journalists.”

My response to this is that it’s only a tough spot to be in if you think your readers or viewers are absolutely, utterly stupid. I blogged a bit about this before on the issue of journalists’ contributions to political campaigns.

The gigantic logic flaw in the middle of this debate remains the same: The absence of proof of bias is not the same as the actual absence of bias. It absolutely slays me that a significant number of leaders in this industry think that if readers don’t know or have documentation of a journalists’ political affiliation or beliefs, then the reader will just assume the journalist doesn’t have any.

We know this is not true. We know readers already make assumptions about the political leanings of journalists. We are not fooling anybody. This attitude is completely self-absorbed and insulting to our customers. Does not voting in the Colorado caucuses mean that John Doe Journalist wouldn’t prefer Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama? Or vice-versa? Of course not. It just means that we don’t have proof, which means that people will guess or speculate about journalists’ personal views and may or may not be correct. And it doesn’t mean that John Doe Journalist’s reporting won’t be influenced by his feelings toward Clinton or Obama.

There is a solution, and we don’t have to convert to the European model of partisan newspapers (though we’re a lot closer to them than most U.S. media leaders would care to admit). It’s simply being honest and having faith in your readers to discern the truth of what they’re reading or watching. It’s getting over that narcissistic attitude that journalists are some sort of holy paragons of truth as opposed to the reality that we’re a bunch average joes with a curiosity addiction who like to write and talk.

In fact, I’ll start. I voted in the California Primary this morning. Because I’m a “decline to state” voter, I wasn’t able to vote for Ron Paul, whose libertarian anti-war views most match my own. The Republican Party doesn’t allow “decline to state” voters to participate in their primary in California. The Democrats do. Ultimately I voted for Barack Obama (I’m just talking about myself — this isn’t a newspaper endorsement). He seems at first to be a long ways away from Ron Paul in his extremely expensive government funding plans, but there are definitely hints of libertarian mindsets back there with somebody who is interested in moving us past the Boomer-fueled culture wars that I’ve simply grown tired of. The election of Hillary Clinton, I feel, would actually fuel the war further in both parties, and I think Obama’s election would prompt the GOP to adapt eventually to a more libertarian standing or risk irrelevancy.

So what happens now? Now you know a little more about what makes me tick. Of course, I’m not just a typical editor here anyway; I write opinion pieces as well, so I never even had the luxury of acting like I’m above biases. Does this make me more or less trustworthy as a source of information? Granted, as the Desert Dispatch is a community newspaper, I won’t exactly be responsible for putting together a lot of national political coverage. But regardless, I have faith in your ability to look at what we do as a newspaper and come to intelligent conclusions about what we’re reporting. And I don’t believe trust is built between a media outlet and its customers by withholding information about ourselves.

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