You are the boss: The voter in a democracy. It is time to elect a president. What do you need from your newspaper? From what readers tell me, this at least: fair and substantial coverage.
First, fairness — the absence of bias. You want to believe that reporters will approach their work without prejudice.
A widely held view today is that journalists are disproportionately liberal and Democratic. It’s hard to know what to make of this charge: Surveys differ, though many lend credence to it. Beyond that, the attempt to report free of one’s personal biases is so sacred a tenet of journalism that thoughtful newsroom debate on the topic is rare to unknown; denial is the norm. Moreover, those who sniff out failures of objectivity cannot but be subjective themselves. Prejudice, however unlovely, is at least sometimes in the eye of the beholder.
Messy as all that may be, who could believe that, in this one realm of human endeavor alone, mortals might operate unaffected by their views? A careful watch on this issue will always be needed.
In the meantime, there are clearer biases. One is that today’s newspaper people are all too likely to be inside players. Identifying more with the leaders than the led, they may miss one story and make too much of another.
Perhaps most common, though, is not the journalist who is against one side of the race and for the other, not the one tied too closely to both, but the journalist who is agin ‘em all. As a predecessor Post ombudsman, Charles Seib, wrote in these pages 20 years ago: “A legitimate question is, are the practices and techniques of the news business making [candidates] appear to be lesser men than they are and the system more corrupt and ineffective than it is?”
That remains a good question. Little is more valuable to the reader than a journalist’s holding a candidate to the highest standards of honesty and accuracy. A journalistic failure to see the difference between that and tearing the candidate down, however, is painfully costly to democracy.
Now for substance. Here especially is where editors come in. They must see to it that each side gets a balanced airing. Nor is balance a simple matter of putting one candidate’s photo in the same place one day as the other candidate’s photo was the day before. It has to do with judging newsworthiness, with thinking about what is pertinent to each campaign, with making the best decision while heat comes at you from all sides.
Editors must decide at what point polls cease to inform debate and begin to drown it out instead. They must think, both in advance planning and in last-minute decisions, about the best mix of the unfiltered voices of voters, the schooled views of experts and the practiced, measured speaking on the campaign trail.
Editors must struggle with how to give readers what they want and need to know about a scandalous morsel of a candidate’s private life without diluting attention to the heftier public-policy matters. They must demand every effort to make issue stories as compelling as personality profiles. They must determine which key elements of the campaign coverage to repeat once readers actually start paying attention.
And they must do all of this while voters express growing mistrust of the press, candidates find more and more ways to get around the traditional media, and apathy and cynicism abound — or appear to, anyway.
Sage advice may help. Here is that late great thinker on newspapering, Walter Lippmann: “At its best the press is a servant and guardian of institutions; at its worst it is a means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends.”
Finally, one of today’s interesting press thinkers, Prof. James Carey of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism: “Journalism arose as a protest against illegitimate authority in the name of a wider social contract, in the name of the formation of a genuine public life and a genuine public opinion….[Its purpose remains] the development and enhancement of public life, a common life which we can all share as citizens. The role journalism has played in constituting such a life is one of the noblest chapters in our history and one of our most fervent hopes for our future.”
