Despite Flaws, Journalism Must Stay True To Its Ideals

During the Nixon administration, there was no greater plum for journalists than to end up on an “enemies list.” It meant an editor or reporter was too tough, too sharp, too valiant a servant of the public interest to please the president.

So there were more chuckles than outrage when the Wall Street Journal reported that Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary had a little list of “unfavorable” reporters, compiled by a media-evaluation firm.

O’Leary said the goal was to improve the Department of Energy’s credibility.

For $43,500, Carma International pored over stories and newscasts for nine months, assigning “favorability” scores to reporting on the DOE and churning out monthly reports chock filled with graphics and charts.

Along with scoring stories on nuclear waste and DOE labs, Carma evaluated coverage of O’Leary’s image.

Public officials, including President Clinton, also were ranked on their comments. At the top of the list of those favorable to the DOE was: O’Leary.

The fact that public figures try to “spin” press coverage was old news when little Georgie Washington framed his eco-vandalism as an honesty issue.

It’s also no shock to journalists to find out that their sources pay attention to who’s tough and who’s an easy spin. After all, we keep track of who’s straight and who’s shifty.

Carma’s reports for the DOE are ho-hum stuff. More troubling to journalists is the possibility that this sort of thing isn’t a total waste of money.

The Journal’s next-day story reported that media-evaluation is a booming business: The big-money clients are corporations.

Carma evaluates what’s written or said. Other firms claim to evaluate individual reporters, selling biographies or profiles that supposedly enable corporate flacks to tailor their message more precisely. Or know whose phone calls not to return.

One reporter profile printed in the Journal included a numerical rating of writing ability, integrity and personality as well as accuracy. Under “comments,” it said: “Brutally frank. Hates releases and press conferences. Prefers Friday calls.”

“Brutally frank” is a compliment, of course. But, if these media consultants are going to prosper, they’ll have to tell corporations something the PR department can’t figure out for itself.

If you’re trying to settle a multimillion-dollar lawsuit about silicone implants, you’d want to know whether a reporter or anyone in the reporter’s family has had breast cancer. Maybe you want to know if there are doctors in the family.

Already, there are reports of media investigators going far beyond “prefers Friday phone calls.”

Privacy is one issue. Nobody wants a corporate flack to know about his child-support payments, or whether she’s overdrawn on her credit cards.

The other issue is our image of ourselves. We journalists traditionally think of ourselves as objective reporters, capable of setting personal biases aside. Biography is not, in that view, destiny.

The success of media investigation suggests that looking at reporters as individuals, not merely as “the guy from the News,” shows patterns of bias in the reporters that can be exploited. It says objectivity is bunk.

Of course, journalists have been questioning objectivity for years now, but we sort of expected news sources and readers to keep believing in it.

Perhaps no one believes it anymore. The fashionable theory is that truth is entirely subjective. In the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan makes fun of “azzas,” who “believe that all reason gives way at the stoplight of personal experience.” Azza black lesbian, azza white male heterosexual veteran … but never azza thinking human being.

Azza columnist, which means I get to be opinionated openly, I think the idea of objectivity is worth defending. It seems to me to be a worthy goal, even if it’s never perfectly achieved.

Journalism is about breaking out of the limits of personal experience, searching for a wider world, a broader view, new ideas, other people’s realities. Journalists have to stay true to that vision, or we’ll be self-bound azzas, and somebody will pay to know: Azza what?

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