We're Biased p.

By: Tony Case

Journalists at three prominent newspapers say there's nothing wrong with that sp.

JOURNALISTS AT THREE of the country's most prominent newspapers recently admitted that they're biased ? and they say there's nothing wrong with that.
"I tend to believe that all media are inherently biased and that all reporters and all editors if they are intelligent people have strong biases on most subjects," Gabriel Rotello of Newsday said during a discussion at the not-for-profit Center for Communication in New York.
Rotello, who as a columnist is paid to express his beliefs, suggested that newspeople have an image problem not because they're biased but because of the false pretense that they're objective.
There was a time in American journalism when newspapers trumpeted their points of view, when a publication's content unashamedly reflected its publisher's political affiliation and opinions on class and racial struggles.
Today, "you think that you're getting objective news when really you're getting the same old slanted stuff," Rotello said.
He proposed that newspapers go beyond merely dropping hints about their ideologies on editorial pages and plainly state their positions ? political, religious or otherwise ? so the public isn't misled into believing that what it reads is unbiased.
Washington Post New York bureau chief Malcolm Gladwell said it's a given that reporters approach assignments with certain prejudices. The question is: Are they being fair?
Journalistic credibility suffers, he maintained, because readers correctly perceive that newspeople represent a narrow segment of the populace.
At a recent Post staff meeting, some of Gladwell's elder colleagues concurred that American society was "in the toilet" and were incredulous when Gladwell said things weren't so bad.
He supposed that the reason they saw eye-to-eye was that each fit the same demographic profile: Most were children of the Sixties, aged 35 to 45, Democratic, upper-middle-class and residents of the same affluent suburbs.
"Papers like the Washington Post have assembled staffs to write on pressing national issues where everybody's national perspective is a carbon copy of everybody else's," Gladwell groused.
"That's the problem, and as long as we continue to pretend that it is these outward signs of political partisanship that matter, we're going to miss the issue, which is that you have to construct newsrooms not according to some ridiculously reductive quota pattern but to have genuine diversity."
Gladwell would like to see the Post hire national affairs reporters who are religious, have considered voting for a Republican presidential candidate and live in neighborhoods "where not everybody has two cars out front and mows the lawn every night."
The Post and other news organizations have been criticized for forbidding employee involvement in partisan causes. But Gladwell believes that his paper's policy is necessary considering the liberal leanings of most of his cohorts.
"If you have a staff that is as totally unrepresentative of the national divide over abortion as ours is, you'd have to have a rule about not marching in a pro-abortion protest because the whole staff could conceivably be there," he said. "If we had real diversity, it wouldn't be an issue. But we don't."
New York Times metropolitan reporter Michel Marriott said he is not ashamed to let people know where he stands on issues. He wondered who would want to read a news story that is purely objective.
"You could be the penultimate practitioner of fairness but then who'd really believe it?" he asked.
Marriott considers journalism not only an enterprise of ideas but one of passion. "I am passionate about what I do and the things that I encounter, and I think I can examine them and then explain those ideas in a more compelling way when I'm fueled by passion," he said.
That chestnut about good journalists keeping distance between themselves and those whom they interview is baloney, Marriott observed.
"In an interview, I like to give as well as receive," he said. "I think it makes it much more honest, less of an interrogation and more of an interchange. Doing that, of course, I'm going to let them get a sense of me as a human being. I have positions, I have political leanings and I let them know that."
But the reporter conceded that the give-and-take approach doesn't always work. He will avoid attempting to bond with an interviewee who isn't responsive to this camaraderie.
"Overall, I'm trying to get information," he said. "I don't want to do anything that's going to narrow the doorway of information."