Chris Satullo, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and subject of this post, graciously responded to my criticism of his op-ed, even though I called him “pompous” and said his op-ed “reeks of arrogant, elitist, condescending denial.” He’s classy.
I got up on Saturday morning surprised to see it, and I’m glad he came on my blog to defend himself. The following comment was posted on Saturday, October 2, and 1:10:45 am EST:
Wow. This thread has gotten away a bit from the original post critiquing me, but I hope you won’t mind if mildly defend myself.I think if you read my whole piece you’ll see a) that i wasn’t equating all bloggers with the “orwellians.” Far from it. I’m talking about people, most of them political operatives from the left and right, whom i deal with daily and whose goal in crying “Bias” is just to muzzle all criticism of their side, and; b) I would never claim journalists don’t commit sins of bias. Good Lord. I said explicitly that they screw up and provide plenty of ammunition to critics. In fact, I agree that the notion of “objectivity” is a false goal, because unattainable. Everyone is biased. The point in journalism is to have enough loyalty to a set of principles — fairness, thoroughness, accuracy (plus enough internal checks in your organization) — so that you can scour bias from your work as much as humanly possible.
There was a line I cut from the column for space (still a problem when you’re working ink on paper) that I wish I hadn’t, seeing how I left myself open to certain critiques. This was it: “Too many journalists content themselves with a false syllogism: Journalists should be objective; I am a journalist; therefore I am objective.”
That reasoning is of course absurd. The only way to do the job is to be vividly aware of your preconceptions and prejudices, so you can be on the alert for them distorting your work. If you’re smugly clueless that you’re biased, you will screw up.
Call me a fogey, but I still think it’s worthwhile to have some people around whose first allegiance is to those stuffy principles of journalism, instead of having everybody operate on: My team is always right. My team must always win.
Re: the Paris Hilton crack that annoyed some. I’m guessing a lot of people who blast the MSM as a unified entity don’t realize something: most print journalists consider most TV newspeople to be as annoying as you find them to be. we view them as shallow faux journalists. (We have our own flaws, but I’d argue we have a much greater residual allegiance to seriousness and depth) I no more want to be lumped in with Dan Rather than you’d want me to pretend to be spokesman for the blogosophere.
Finally, “make public life go well.” That’s an allusion to the basic creed of civic journalism, which some of you might not be familiar with. The idea is not that journalists know what the best result is; it’s that democracy works best when issues get aired, real dialogue happens and ordinary people aren’t shut out of the deal by elites. It’s actually a commitment not to let arrogant elites have all the fun, and a belief that journalists can help good dialogue to occur. so any card-carrying civic journalist is going to celebrate the blogosphere. Sorry to have rambled. Too much caffeine.
Update (10/5): More on Christ Satullo from PressThink.
