推 fjjkk:感性=Obama 理性=Clinton 02/20 23:41
這篇評論雖然是在抱怨媒體過度偏坦Obama，不過我很喜歡，因為
作者非常坦白，相信多數的Obama支持者看了也會覺得非常痛快。
作者認為記者絕對沒有所有的中立客觀這一回事，從事這行業多
年，絕對有自己的信念、價值觀與立場，像部份記者聲稱為了要
保持客觀，連投票所都不進，這實在是矯情了點，只是一種自我
欺騙，也是對讀者的欺騙。
因此他主張記者不但不應該聲稱中立而隱瞞自己的立場，反而
應該把自己的政治傾向公開出來方便大眾判斷他們的報導夠不夠
中肯，這點我深以為然。
文末他坦白的表示自己在初選中投了Clinton一票，這點我不
介意，反而讓我覺得他的評論既誠實，也切中了要點。如果他
假稱中立來做這樣的批判，反而對我來講不會有同樣的說服力。
==
雖然不是記者，不過我想既然不時會有參與討論的機會，我也
該效仿Jarvis先生的作法，聲明自己的立場:如果我有投票權，
我會投給Obama一票。
The objectivity myth
US elections 2008: The media's obvious love of Barack Obama is one more
reason reporters should disclose their political leanings
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeff_jarvis/2008/02/
the_objectivity_myth.html
Members of the media have an Obama problem they're going to have to grapple
with now or after the election: They love him. They hate Hillary. And the gap
between the two is clearly seen in coverage, which surely is having an impact
on the election.
This, to me, only gives more weight to the argument that journalists should
be disclosing their allegiances and votes. Reporters are not just covering
the story. This year, they are part of the story. The ethic of transparency
that I have learned online and that journalists apply to everyone they cover
should also apply to them. I say that journalists have a responsibility to
reveal their own views and votes - even as they endeavour to report with
fairness, completeness, accuracy and intellectual honesty - and we have a
right to judge their success or failure accordingly, as we also have a right
to judge their roles in the stories they are covering.
No, I don't buy for a second that journalists don't have opinions. They're
human. To say that they are above opinions is just another means for
journalists to separate themselves from the public they serve, to act as if
they are different, above us. But journalists couldn't do their jobs if they
didn't have opinions, if they didn't have a reason to do this story over
that. Yet this is the fiction some journalists tell when they try to prove
they are opinionless by not voting. As far as I'm concerned, that's only
evidence that they are trying to delude themselves or us.
And this year, the media's role in the Obama wave is an angle of the story
that itself warrants reporting. Says Bill Clinton:
"The political press has avowedly played a role in this election. I've never
seen this before. They've been active participants in this election."
Don't you want to know the opinions of the political press? Don't you want to
be able to judge their reporting accordingly? What makes them think that they
can and should hide that from us?
Terence Smith wrote a dead-on column about the delta between negative Hillary
and positive Obama coverage:
"The coverage of Hillary during this campaign has been across-the-board
critical, especially since she began losing after New Hampshire....
"And her campaign has taken the tough-love approach with the reporters who
cover it, frequently ostracising those they think are critical or hostile.
That kind of aggressive press-relations strategy may sometimes be justified,
but it rarely effective. Reporters are supposed to be objective and
professional. But they are human. They resent the cold shoulder, even if they
understand the campaign's motivation.
The result is coverage that is viscerally harsh: her laugh is often described
as a 'cackle'. Her stump speech is dismissed as dry and tiresomely
programmatic. She is accused of projecting a sense of entitlement, as though
the presidency should be hers by default, that it is somehow now her turn to
be president. When she makes changes in her campaign hierarchy, she is
described as 'desperate'."
And on Obama:
"By contrast, has the coverage of Obama been overly sympathetic? Have
reporters romanticised the junior senator from Illinois? Have they glamorised
him and his wife? Did they exaggerate the significance of Ted Kennedy's
endorsement? Have they given him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to
his meagre experience?
"Of course they have.
"His rise to frontrunner is described as meteoric, his speeches as
mesmerising, his crowds as enraptured, his charisma as boundless. Obama is
characterised as the second-coming of JFK, etc etc. It is all a bit much."
On NPR, media watcher David Folkenflik says:
"Many reporters admit privately that they feel differently about the two
candidates. And there's a phrase that's surfaced to described the phenomenon
that's afflicted MSNBC's [Chris] Matthews: the Obama swoon."
And why should reporters get away with saying that privately? I want a camera
in the voting booth with Matthews - he of the too-frequent, too-late
apologies - to verify the obvious. I want to know how they're voting.
But some journalists try to evade that legitimate question by not voting, as
if that absolves them of opinions and blame. Len Downie, editor of the
Washington Post - and by that evidence, a damned good editor he is - has long
argued that by not voting he keeps himself pure:
"Yes, I do not vote.... I wanted to keep a completely open mind about
everything we covered and not make a decision, even in my own mind or the
privacy of the voting booth, about who should be president or mayor, for
example."
Sorry, but I still don't buy that, and I fear that excuse is seeping down to
others on his staff. Here is the Post's Chris Cillizza - a fine political
correspondent himself - arguing that not voting makes him objective:
"[O]bjectivity in covering these races means that you stay objective before,
during and after the contests. As, or perhaps more importantly, however, is
the obsession among some people to sniff out a reporter's 'secret' political
leanings. Time and time again, I find people commenting on this blog and
elsewhere accusing me of having a pro-Clinton or pro-Obama or pro-McCain or
pro-someone else viewpoint. I know in my hearts of hearts that I don't have
any of those biased viewpoints, but if I did vote - even in a local or county
election - it would add fuel to the fire of those folks who think I am a
secret partisan.
I have to say I smelled some Obama roses blooming in this from Cillizza on
Howie Kurtz's show:
KURTZ: "Chris Cillizza, you could argue about whether this Kennedy
endorsement was a big deal, but what a collective swoon by the media - ask
not why this was such a big story. Are they totally buying into Obama as the
new JFK?
CILLIZZA: "Well, you know, I do think, Howie, that in the Democratic party,
people have been waiting for the next JFK. If you are looking for the next
John F Kennedy, I believe he is it."
After a line like that, there is good reason to ask where his heart is. You
can stay away from the voting booth, but that doesn't make you into the
Tinman.
I agree with John Harris, head of Politico, who calls this a tedious argument
- "a subset of the most endless and least satisfying debate in the whole
profession: Is true objectivity ever possible?" Harris does vote - sometimes.
He responds to two colleagues writing about their views on voting at Politico:
"It is admirable that [Politico colleagues] Mike and Jim cleave to a
scientific ideal of journalistic detachment, the way a surgeon cannot
tolerate even the slightest bacteria on his instruments. Their piety on this
subject is especially notable in an era when traditional lines governing
journalism (or even who counts as a journalist in the first place) have
blurred, and many new arrivals to the business don't care at all about old
notions of neutrality and fair-minded presentation.
"But Jim is right that I find his obsession a bit silly - and a bit
self-deluded. ...
"My belief is that being a journalist for an ideologically neutral
publication like Politico, or the Washington Post, where I used to work, does
not mean having no opinions. It means exercising self-discipline in the
public expression of those opinions so as not to give sources and readers
cause to question someone's commitment to fairness."
But Harris turns around and says he didn't vote in the primary because he
didn't want to declare a party and then have readers make assumptions about
where he stands. So he's pulling the same trick: He's trying to hide his
opinions. Isn't that a form of deception by omission? Isn't it at least coy?
I like his scientific analogy, but I'll take it a different way: A scientist
surely has desires. A doctor studying cancer naturally wants to cure it;
she's against cancer. That doctor has opinions and beliefs, hypotheses to
prove or disprove. But intellectual honestly will demand disproving a
hypothesis that is wrong even if she believed it to be true. One can have
opinions and still be factual, fair, honest and truthful. Indeed, it is
easier to judge that scientist's work by knowing what she's looking for.
Steve Baker of Business Week goes one step farther:
"I think it's impossible for a person who thinks about politics, and cares
about it, not to prefer one candidate to another. It's fine for journalists
not to broadcast our political views, but why pretend that we don't have
them? What's important is to be fair. And if we want to keep our views
secret, well that's why it's good that voting booths have curtains."
I don't think either Harris or Baker goes far enough. I believe that
journalists should vote. They are citizens - and some get mad at me when I
refer to amateurs as citizen journalists because they demand the label, too.
They are human, too - they have opinions. They also have ethics that demand
that they try to be - repeating the list of verities - fair, honest, complete
and intellectually honest, and I believe most hold to that. But now add the
ethics of transparency and openness - and trust in the public you serve - and
I believe that, especially this year, journalists owe it to us to tell us
what they're thinking. The only thing worse than an agenda is a hidden agenda.
In the end, there are people out here sniggering at the behaviour of media
toward Obama like high-school seniors giggling at the schoolboy crushes of
freshmen boys and girls. Here's the New York Times' David Brooks today making
fun of them all as he writes about Obama Comedown Syndrome:
"Up until now The Chosen One's speeches had seemed to them less like
stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and
space. But those in the grips of Obama Comedown Syndrome began to wonder if
His stuff actually made sense. For example, His Hopeness tells rallies that
we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change we have
been waiting for then why have we been waiting since we've been here all
along?
"Patients in the grip of OCS rarely express doubts at first, but in a classic
case of transference, many experience slivers of sympathy for Hillary
Clinton. They see her campaign morosely traipsing from one depressed
industrial area to another - The Sitting Shiva for America Tour. They see
that her entire political strategy consists of waiting for primary states as
boring as she is.
"They feel for her. They feel guilty because the entire commentariat now
treats her like Richard Nixon. Are liberal elites rationalising their own
betrayal of her?"
(I didn't think it was necessary to append this to every post on the topic
but judging by the comments on my own blog, it couldn't hurt: I voted for
Clinton in the primaries. As if you couldn't guess. But at least in my case -
unlike that of the journalists covering her - you didn't have to guess.)
--
Clinton is an essay, solid and reasoned; Obama
is a poem, lyric and filled with possibility. Clinton would be a valuable and
competent executive, but Obama matches her in substance and adds something
that the nation has been missing far too long -- a sense of aspiration.
--
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