Consider this a parting gift:
For four years many of you have been calling on me to acknowledge that the newspaper is incapable of fairness because it is staffed and edited by liberals.
Yes, we have plenty of liberals at work here, but they are entirely capable of being fair. The issues you have with them probably have more to do with their being journalists than being liberals.
Journalists share some traits that are rightly or wrongly associated with liberal ideology. Among other things, when they see something bad happening an injustice to someone, a failed government program, the stench of corruption and the whiff of cronyism, or just wasted taxpayer money they want to expose it, to let you know about it. And when they can make sense of those stories and can verify their reporting, we let them. In fact, we encourage them.
If journalists are anything, they are dyed-in-the-wool reformers; always have been, always will be. That’s why they can easily be mistaken for liberals, especially problematic for us because that term is tagged with unholy partisanship these days. Journalists look at stories and automatically think, “What can be done to fix this?”
They take the last of the five W’s (you remember those who, what, when, where and why) seriously. It is that W that separates journalists from stenographers and opens the door for those who disagree with their assessment to lodge a knee-jerk claim of bias.
I don’t mean to minimize actual bias. It is there and needs to be rooted out. But in today’s political climate, reform becomes entangled with advocacy, and advocacy has become synonymous with special interests and partisanship. Journalists pay the price for it.
Sometimes that’s our fault. The best journalists find ways to report how programs and policies can be improved without relying on out-of-power politicians to promote the cause. A shallow journalist lets politicians and advocates (or “activists,” to use another overused word) dictate the terms of the debate. Regrettably, in recent years, it has happened with alarming frequency.
That’s how we get to the linkage of the term “liberal” with “Democrat” that is so often used to describe journalists.
When a story reports partisan criticism of, say, the Bush administration’s environmental or economic policies, it’s easy to see why readers discount the story as biased. When reporters write stories about the Perdue administration’s “slashing” of state health care programs for children or nursing home patients and allow advocates to frame the debate without considering what alternatives for budget reductions they would propose we provide ammunition for the charge that liberal orthodoxy supersedes fair reporting.
Here’s the good news: It’s easy to fix. Deeper reporting, more scrutiny and skepticism in the editing process and less reliance on advocates and partisans for basic research will make our stories better and more credible.
But acknowledging that we often bring a call for reform and government intervention into the equation is also important. Rather than argue with readers over whether that’s a legitimate role for us, we should concentrate on doing our jobs better.
That’s the easy part. More problematic, I believe, is what to do about this “values” lesson journalists learned from last week’s voting.
Voters said they want politicians who use the same moral compass they use. Readers say the same thing about newspapers. It goes like this: If the newspaper doesn’t reflect my values, then why should I continue to subscribe?
At heart, though, the newspaper does reflect most people’s values. We cherish democracy and human equality. We want people to be safe and free and governments to be open and honest. We believe education is vitally important.
Obviously, there are times when readers’ and journalists’ values might seem to conflict. For instance, if the Legislature moves to outlaw civil commitments between same-sex couples in Georgia, should we ignore the impact that would have on gay and lesbian couples because Georgia voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the state constitution that bans gay marriage? Does last week’s vote mean we ought to frame our coverage based on how the vote broke down?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that’s the lesson to take home from the campaign of 2004. Readers expect us to present both sides of social issues. They aren’t asking for coverage that reflects only the view of the majority.
The lesson is much more subtle, but still very powerful.
Readers want their lives, their lifestyles and their sensibilities to be taken more seriously. They don’t want to be made fun of for their political point of view, the faith they freely and proudly espouse, the place where they choose to live or how they raise their children. And when they read about people like themselves in stories about social or cultural issues, they don’t want them to be unfairly portrayed as unenlightened or bigoted or racist because they share a real fear that the culture popular and political is in decline.
And that’s a bigger challenge for us because we’re not very much like our readers. We tend to be younger (by 10 years or so); live in town (certainly not in the suburbs, where the majority of the readers are) and we rarely go to church, if we are religious at all. We don’t hang with the same folks our readers hang with. We don’t read what they read. (I doubt more than a third of the news staff could tell you who Rick Warren is. For journalists reading this: Google him.)
That disconnection is at the heart of the crisis American journalism faces.
It isn’t that the newspaper’s editorial board is too liberal and needs more local conservative and moderate voices, although it does. It isn’t that the staff reporters are biased against Republicans, or conservatives, although we must plead guilty at times to sloppy shorthand descriptions or failure to provide context for what we write. Both of these are being addressed. And this office, by the way, remains the place to raise those issues when we fall short.
The harder issue for us is in finding our readership roots and bringing the daily coverage in the newspaper closer to the mainstream. If we are to play a credible role in helping readers sort out complex issues and provide news that is meaningful to them; if we want to lighten their load at times with stories that both entertain and uplift, we have to listen closer to what they say they want.
None of this should be read as a call to abandon the tradition of shining journalism’s spotlight into the darkest corners of injustice, speaking up for those who can’t and afflicting the comfortable from time to time. As long as we do so fairly and in a way that doesn’t compromise our credibility, readers will continue to appreciate that.
But winning back readers who think we are out of step with their daily lives is a bigger challenge. That will happen only by understanding their interests better, by spending more time with them and less time with the politicians and advocates.
One final note: There is no apology here for liberal bias. Faulty, incomplete and sometimes unfair reporting, yes. We are human and make mistakes.
But the most often suggested alternative to turn journalism into public stenography is not the answer either, even when it gives elected officials and their supporters the illusion of fairness and balance. Over the long haul, in the battle for truth over propaganda and thoughtful public discourse over the partisan hackery that now passes as commentary, you want real journalists out there doing their jobs, especially when it challenges your own view of the world.
Time to move on
Today marks my last day as the go-to person for questions, comments and criticisms about The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The new public editor is Angela Tuck. She comes to the job with years of experience as both a reporter and editor. Most recently she has been the director of newsroom personnel so she knows virtually every journalist at the paper. She’ll be telling you more about herself when she resumes this column in a few weeks. Suffice it to say that she is a kinder, more organized person than yours truly. She’ll probably be better at returning the dozens of phone calls and e-mails that you send to this office every day.
I wish in my first 28 years as a journalist that I had had the opportunity to talk with all the thoughtful readers who have called and written during the last four. What has sustained me in this role is the realization that for every crank who doesn’t read the paper but still calls to criticize it, there are two or three loyal readers who have called to ask why we did something, listened to the explanation, accepted it (sometimes reluctantly) and offered advice about how to do it better.
I am thankful for the experience.
The next outpost for me will be on the newspaper’s editorial board, where I’ll be joining Cynthia Tucker and Jim Wooten, Jay Bookman and a talented group of opinion writers and @issue editors.
I hope to bring to that group what you have been telling me for four years it really needs. The guidance I seek in this new role comes from so many conversations I have had with so many of you. It is the guidance that hangs from the columns of the arch at the center of Georgia’s state seal.
Wisdom. Justice. Moderation.
And when you disagree with something I write, you can call me directly. The public editor will be busy enough.
