Dr. Denny Wilkins, my esteemed colleague in the J/MC program here at SBU, sent this around a few minutes ago: Glimpse at the future looks neither fair nor balanced

But the squall that took everybody by surprise isn’t named Ivan or Frances or Charley, and it had nothing to do with Dan Rather. It was Fox News Channel, which rolled over the competition for a sweep in viewers during the Republican National Convention, trouncing even the vaunted network news divisions three nights in a row…. Many current and former television news executives fear that the Republican National Convention might mark a turning point toward a more partisan news culture. They point not only to Fox but to the tentative early success of the liberal talk radio network Air America Radio, which has managed to attract young listeners and has been picked up by Clear Channel stations in some markets, to a slew of successful left-wing documentary films, including “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and INdTV, the new cable channel that former Vice President Al Gore plans to launch.

The question I suppose we’re to consider is whether or not we need to be concerned and/or openly frightened by the implications of this. Well, maybe – I mean, I pretty much stay concerned when it comes to the question of information in society and our apparent inability to parse even the simple bits of it. But with respect to the future of objective journalism, well, let’s just say I’m losing less sleep on that count than on others. So I decided to reply to Dr. Wilkins and the rest of the faculty here, and he’s what I said:
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Let’s fix this one sentence:

>> “I think it’s a watershed moment in the politicization of journalism,” said David Bernknopf, a media consultant and former CNN executive.

That should read:

>> “I think it’s a watershed moment in the RE-politicization of journalism,” said David Bernknopf, a media consultant and former CNN executive.

Listen, as bad as I hate FAUX News, I think we need to make ourselves comfortable with a few things:

1: Objectivity is perhaps a worthy ideal, but it isn’t now, nor has it EVER been, a reality.

2: Objectivity is a fairly recent blip on the journalism dial. Did Jefferson even have such a concept in his head?

3: The failings of the established institutions have been mirrored by a less publicized, but very real, improvement in the quality of the subjective/advocacy press. The best example is the horrific cluster surrounding coverage of the Columbine shootings. The national media and the local press – most notably the Denver Post and RM News – were responsible not only for bad journalism, in that they just got things WRONG left and right, but also for the premeditated reporting of things they KNEW to be false (here we get into the “Cassie said yes” myth, which both papers continued to report as fact even after they had verified the Salon.com report that it never happened). This is Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair stuff, only worse, because these papers have never been called on it and drummed out of the corps like Blair and Cooke (rightfully) were. In this case, the quality reporting was being done by Salon.com and Westword, the Denver weekly, neither of which have ever been accused of objective journalism. If I were handing out Pulitzers, Salon would have gotten one, in fact.

Sure, there are economic, cultural and institutional issues at work here, but let’s face up to the reality of the world we’re training students for. Subjective coverage doesn’t bother them so much as long as the sources are up front about their biases. They don’t buy the claims to objectivity by the traditional agencies anyway, and why should they?

Is this the fall of Rome? I don’t think so. Hunter Thompson, in the epilogue to BETTER THAN SEX, lays the blame for Tricky Dick Nixon at the feet of objective journalism, and does so in a way that’s got to be uncomfortable for a committed journalist.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism—which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

This is, of course, a testable hypothesis. As an exercise, let’s compare the presidents who have ascended on the watch of objective journalism with those who came before. In particular, let’s look at the last four years of political coverage by Big Journalism. Then explain to me how an informed, good faith subjectivity would be much worse.