DMN's Rodrigue on Media Bias

DMN Managing Editor George Rodrigue does a surprisingly efficient job of answering the ubiquitous rightwing crank slamming his paper as godless and liberal. Interesting, for one, because the anti-Christian crank reminds me of how Dan Patrick kicked off the long-since failed ChronicallyBiased.com gig by suggesting same for the local paper ... due to a negative movie review of Mel Gibson's The Passion and practically nothing more. Interesting, for the second, because the Dallas Morning News is clearly one of the most pro-Republican major-city papers here in Texas, going so far as to hire Rod Dreher from National Review to serve as editorial writer and columnist.

Anyways, I'll let Rodrigue speak for himself. I merely lend my applause.

A phone caller the other day said he believes The News is anti-Christian, anti-fundamentalist, pro-multiculturalism and generally too quick to call everything into question. He pointed out that many of our readers are conservative white folks, and suggested that we should try to tailor the news to their liking. He also opined that our thinking as journalists was warped by the '60s.

There's much to say about this. For instance, journalists are probably children of the '60s - but that would be the 1760s, not the 1960s. We do have professional biases, but not necessarily the political ones that many people suspect. And we try hard not to tailor the news to the prejudices of our audience, but to their interests.

Professional history
Journalists in the U.S. aren't licensed, but we are a profession in the sense of having a shared sense of our history. That history dates back to the age of the American Enlightenment, which spanned the end of the colonial era and the rise of a free nation. Several intellectual and cultural features characterized the time:

• A craving for knowledge and wisdom.

• A belief that an informed public should govern itself, and that public debate, with all the available facts on the table, was the route to civic wisdom.

• A sense that following Reason (they loved their capital letters back then) was akin to following God, because why else would the Creator give us the power of reason?

From the late 1600s until the Revolutionary War, freedom of inquiry and freedom of the press were huge influences in Colonial politics. Colonial journalists, in turn, were deeply influenced by the political and philosophical debates of the time.

John Peter Zenger's 1735 acquittal on charges of libeling the governor of New York was a political sensation, because the jurors effectively ruled that the press could criticize those in power, so long as it did so truthfully.

After the war, Thomas Jefferson famously said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." The First Amendment was designed to ensure that the young nation would have both.

Bias or mission?
Our origins have left a stamp on the modern-day profession. A certain mindset is common across most of the nation's newsrooms. Journalists generally think they should:

• Help voters hold government accountable to the public, by treating all public proclamations skeptically.

• Treat no fact or claim as beyond question.

• Give a voice to all sides of every public debate.

• Extend special care for the needs or stories of the otherwise voiceless - the ordinary people who lack money or organization to influence government through lobbyists, for instance.

• Follow stories, once launched, to their natural conclusions.

As journalists, we view these things not as form of political bias but as a professional mission. One can understand, however, why some of our readers would feel otherwise.

If one is a devoted follower of the political party in power, one is likely to view journalists' more probing questions as a form of impertinence, or perhaps of attack. (Mr. Jefferson, who so revered newspapers before his presidency, said this afterward: "Advertisements ... contain the only truths to be relied upon in a newspaper." Based partly on a long history of governmental manipulation of the facts, we tend to think that failure to ask hard questions amounts to dereliction of duty. But we do try to ask hard questions of any and all parties in power.

If one devoutly believes in a fundamentalist reading of any religious text, one might regard stories that reflect well on other beliefs as an assault one's own faith; we tend to focus on the duty to tell all sides of every story. One might also see repeated reports on misdeeds by clerics of one's own faith as an assault on fellow believers. We tend to think we are just following stories to their natural end - say, from arrest to indictment to trial to conviction - and that we are protecting the vulnerable from abuse.

Appealing to interests
Finally, it's probably true that most traditional journalists strongly resist tailoring the news to the prejudices of their audiences.

There are celebrities and showmen who specialize in forging comfortable emotional bonds with true believers in their audience. Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken can be heard on the radio, Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan can be watched on cable TV, and Michael Moore can be viewed in the movie theater.

But traditional newspaper journalists generally try to appeal to their readers' interests. In the features sections, that means what it sounds like. We try to write about things that interest our readers. In the "hard news" sections, it means we try to look out for our readers' best interests by sharing as much useful information and perspective - good and bad, agreeable and disagreeable - as time and space permit.

This all sounds very noble, and I think it's a fair description of what we aspire to be. But, alas, it's not a fair description of every story in the paper. We're all quite human. We sometimes fail to ask questions, or we ask the wrong ones, or we make false assumptions that skew our stories.

Finally, there's an element of judgment in everything we do that makes journalism far more an art (we often call it a "craft") than a science. All sorts of folks in the newsroom make those judgments, from all sorts of perspective. We have some fairly liberal writers and editors - not New York liberal, maybe, but liberal for Texas - we have moderates, and we also have some whose politics lie to the right of Ethelred the Unready. We've got some great journalists who never graduated from college and at least one with a Ph.D. in molecular biology.

So, as one might imagine, we ourselves wake up on many mornings asking each other, "Did we get that right?"