As a critic of the media, you might think the word “objectivity” dominates my vocabulary. For so many of my colleagues and readers, that word represents integrity, the pillar of ethical journalism, often their only consideration when critically analyzing the news. It is abhorrent for a media member to be politically observant, they say. It is unprofessional to be opinionated, to protest injustices or even publicly show support for political candidates with hand-clapping.
These attitudes are a spear in the gut of newspapering. The lack of news analysis and development of opinions is what makes journalism so meek. Not that I think a reporter or editor should tailor the news to suit his or her agenda. Newsroom hierarchy is structured to prohibit that. News organizations have a system of checks and balances that ideally monitor the fairness and accuracy of reporting so that rigging the news should be impossible, especially if the media is truly accountable to critical readers.
Newspapers’ principal value should not be to portray a monotone scope of the globe and expect readers to interpret it entirely for themselves. The bulky and confusing nature of all of this information can make it impossible to decipher. Certainly, diligent readers are capable and deserve that responsibility, but input from “insiders” through editorials and opinion columns is crucial. Newspapers must not go the way of the talking hairdo, the television newscast, which has long abolished the commentary course of its stale news cuisine. It was reassuring years ago, when local stations’ general managers delivered a small opinion segment at the end of a broadcast, that there was one homely person on television.
Another incentive for a quality-driven paper to treasure its precious opinion page: The sorriest excuse for newspapering, USA Today, has never had one.
The opinion page of newspapers is what asserts the medium as a tool of citizenship, a necessary element of our democratic society. As an active consumer of many different news sources and the person who delivers the world to you every day through this newspaper’s Nation and World pages, I feel very compelled to be a columnist. I read stacks of newsprint, from local ’zines to the snobby New York Times, chew on plenty of Internet publications and chat with diverse people about such things. I want to be able to tell readers what I think of local, national and international issues once a week or so. Can I still be trusted to throw down the nation and world pages, reliably and objectively, if I do? Even if I am very opinionated about national and international politics?
I can be relied upon and even appreciated a bit more because I am not a sterile bystander. The most respected and successful journalism pairs diligent reporting with astute conclusions, just in separate sections to avoid any misunderstanding. Earlier this century, confronted with many of the greedy powers that challenged democracy and the quality of life of the people, muckraking journalists dug in. They prevailed because they did not write that oligarchy was maybe a threat. The same evils that the muckrakers jousted are still here, bigger and badder than ever and picking on the American people, but the media is too busy chasing Buttafuoccos to really do its job. They shrug, it’s what the people what.
I like to give newspaper readers more credit. They use newspapers for community activism, they understand the difference between the news pages and the opinion pages and the merits of each. Readers deserve more than inconclusive, bland news stories: “Protesters say there is police brutality and substantiate this conclusion with reliable evidence. Police retort, saying it is not true without any proof.” These incidents happen over and over and the media gives them with the same jaded and uncritical spin. If that treatment is respectable, “objective” journalism, then there are many deluded journalists. If I am questionable ethically and endanger credibility because I edit national and international news stories and want to tie it all together in the appropriate forum, perhaps journalism is more engorged with paranoia and disease than I thought.
My opinion will get out regardless because I am going to say it anyway. I’ll just use my breath instead of ink and old-growth forests. Somebody has to be the cancer eating at corruption and conventional assumption if the newspaper is too cowardly.
Erica Saelens, State News wire editor, can be reached at saelense@msu.edu.
