My first big story was the federal attempt to achieve the racial integration of the Boston public schools through forced busing back in the early 1970s. I walked in as a standard-issue ‘60s left-liberal, a vehement—though never violent—supporter of the civil rights and antiwar movements. I was working for an underground newspaper at the time, The Real Paper (edited by the great Paul Solman who now does the business and economics reporting for the PBS News Hour). I was appalled, from the jump, by the flagrant racism in white working-class neighborhoods like South Boston and among local gonzo—a Southie term—politicians like Louise Day Hicks, Albert “Dapper” O’Neill and School Board Chair John Kerrigan.
But a funny thing happened on the road to confirmation bias. I actually went out and reported the story. I talked to people, relentlessly, for more than a year, on both the black and white sides of town. And I couldn’t find a single black parent who favored busing. There were local politicians who waved the integration flag—an early realization that black politicians tend to reflect the anger of their constituents but not necessarily their interests. Mainstream institutions like the Boston Globe and the local television stations waved the flag, too. Suburban liberals, like the judge W. Arthur Garrity who ordered the regime (he lived in ritzy Wellesley, of course), and Boston’s disproportionate share of academic lefties thought busing was a great idea—and so did my colleagues at The Real Paper. But black parents in Dorchester would tell me things like: “We spent the past three years fighting to get a hot breakfast program in the school and now they’re sending our kids off to get bricks thrown at them in Southie.”
So I opposed busing, while searching for other ways to bring kids of different ethnicities together (over time, I came to believe that theme-based charter schools were best). This led to several major career adjustments on my part: first, a lifetime interest in what actually works when it comes to education. But, more important, I realized that to have opinions I needed to actually go out and report the stories. Life was a lot more complicated than ideology. This was especially obvious when it came to race, the most crucial American problem and the subject of more public nonsense, from all sides than any other issue.
So I was interested when Bret Stephens, one of my favorite columnists, took on two of my favorite former news executives—Len Downie of The Washington Post and Andrew Heyward of CBS News—for their recent report and proposal that journalists move beyond objectivity.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/opinion/mainstream-media-credibility-objectivity-journalism.html
I’m all for that, sort of. I’m in favor of reporters reporting the truth as they find it, not as they hope it might be. That truth can be “liberal”—tax increases on the wealthy usually don’t hurt the economy—or “conservative” (busing). But the key thing is for journalists to actually go out and do the reporting—and not lean on their own identity agendas, or the prejudices of their publications.
My real uh-oh moment with Len and Andrew’s report came when they called for more diversity in the newsroom. Some thoughts about that:
Define Diversity. After nearly fifty years of sitting at morning news meetings, I’ve worked with, and appreciated the views of, all sorts of folks—with the exception of evangelical Christians. I’ve had women editors for 40 years and they were, by and large, better than men; there have always been blacks, browns, Asians and gay people at the table. But people of strong fundamentalist faith? Not so much. I’m glad that the New York Times has opened its pages to people of like Pete Wehner, and I was a devotee of the late Washington Post columnist Mike Gerson, one of the sweetest humans I’ve ever met. But I can’t remember an evangelical regular at the Newsweek or Time news meetings (and certainly not the New Yorker); actual church-(or synagogue or mosque) goers were few and far between. It also would have been nice to have a black evangelical or two, since the black church is the most important institution in that community. (They did exist at these publications, mostly in staff positions, and rarely spoke up). This hampered accurate coverage of a good section of white—and black, and Latino—working class America.
For example: I worked for a time as a commentator for CBS News, which routinely reported that the “evangelical vote” in the 1988 Iowa caucuses belonged to Pat Robertson. That was true, in a broad brush sort of way. But incomplete. So I rustled up a camera crew and asked a local pastor in Des Moines to organize a little focus group to talk presidential politics. A dozen people, more or less. And yes, there was some support for Robertson…but also for three other candidates, including Steve Forbes, of all people. A few of them were even Democrats. Since it was Iowa, the majority were undecided. (They loved to torture us that way.) This didn’t change the basic truth of evangelical support for Pat Robertson, but it gave some human texture to it. Speaking of which…
At the other end of the spectrum, being different, or “diverse,” isn’t necessarily newsworthy. I’m thinking of the current flood tide of stories about transgender people. By a very unscientific estimate—my own—the New York Times and Washington have probably done stories about 87% of the transgender people extant in their respective metropolitan areas. There just aren’t that many such people; less than 1% of the population (gay people are about 5%, according to most polls, which may or may not be accurate, since sexuality is something a lot of people don’t like talking about). I have nothing against transgender people—I abhor prejudice of any kind—although I do believe there should be elaborate caution taken when teaching pre-pubescent kids about sex, especially when informing unhappy young people that they can achieve self-actualization by doing violence to their bodies. In any case, the sheer preponderance of stories about this issue is, I believe, misleading the public about how significant it is; it is diversity run amok. Why all the stories? I suspect prurience may have something to do with it. Sex sells.
Diversity also means that black reporters—and especially columnists—should feel free to report about non-racial issues, and vice versa! White and Latino columnists should be encouraged to write about African-American topics. The notion of “cultural appropriation” is censorship, pure and simple. Non-woke views about race should be encouraged. This is especially true because wokeness often involves group-thought, and writers should stand strong against that plague. Journalists of every racial or ethnic group should be allowed to point out that police murders are exceedingly rare, and declining, and they produce not nearly the body-count that the black-on-black crime does. If Black Lives Matter, all black lives should matter. If police racism is taken into account so should be the tangled sociology of the black family since the atrocity of enslavement. The taking of an innocent life by the forces of the state is not just a individual tragedy, but an assault on democracy. But the impression that most murdered black young men die at the hands of the police is simply inaccurate. It is bad journalism.
Finally, and once again: Good reporting—actual, real, pound-the-pavement reporting—is at the heart of good journalism. Talking to real people grinds down the simplicities of ideology. It’s more important than reading polls or talking to “experts.” That means if you go out and interview a bunch of poor people who are more concerned about crime than police brutality, you report it. That means if you’re the Boston Globe and you find that most black parents are opposed to busing, you report it. (The Globe won a Pulitzer Prize for its lack of objectivity.) In the end, “Objectivity” is an elusive goal. Fairness is a more reasonable standard. In my experience, the reporters and columnists I admired most were the fair ones—who were the overwhelming majority.
As I said at the top, Len Downie and Andrew Heyward have lived their lives on the side of the angels. But there is no topic that American journalists get more pompous and bent out of shape about than…journalism. It really isn’t rocket science: You can have opinions if you research them. There aren’t two sides to every story. Sometimes there are three. Sometimes one of the “sides” is a crock of bull and needs to be called out. I’m a lot more concerned that the forces of censorship are preventing us from looking into the stories that reveal inconvenient truths.
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"But the impression that most murdered black young men die at the hands of the police is simply inaccurate. It is bad journalism." I'm trying to think of any articles I've read that have left that impression, and I keep coming up empty.