Musing on Reporting 4

I had my attention drawn to this discussion following a post by Alan Loudell on his WDEL-AM blog.

I attempted to post a comment, but his blog apparently doesn’t like me (and it doesn’t even know me yet!). Actually, I suspect my comment ran up against some edit–it’s kind of long.

So I’ll post it here. But it won’t make much sense unless you at least skim the conversation between Mr. Loudell and his reader.

My, what an interesting exchange.

It illustrates several characteristics of our current (lack of) political discourse that bother me.

One is the loss of understanding of the difference between fact and opinion. It is the job of reporters to report facts. Unfortunately, for political, this often results in reporting the opinions of influential persons, and opinions are not facts.

I think awareness of this–that in reporting opinions, they are not reporting facts–is one thing which led to the countervailing expert technique (one rightwinger + one leftwinger = objectivity.)

That, of course, does not equal objectivity if one of the experts is lying or is speaking from a point of view so morally and realistically absurd as to be no better than a lie.

I would are argue that political reporters have an obligation not just to report on the countervailing opinions,

If one expert says the sky blue and the other says it is magenta and if the reporter knows that the sky is, indeed, magenta, the reporter is obligated to point that out, because it is fact, even if reporting that fact undermines the credibility of one of the experts. (I am reminded of an old Perry Mason story in which Perry was questioning an “expert witness.” When asked his profession, the witness said, “Expert.” It turned out he had no qualifications; he was an expert only because he hung out a shingle saying so.)

Many of the press failed in their obligation to report facts in the hysteria following the September 11 attacks and the relentless Bushie drumbeat for War! War! War!

The Moyers report made that clear.

Two is that having an opinion does not make one an expert. I have a blog. I freely share my opinions with my two or three regular readers. I try to be a will-informed citizen, but my areas of expertise do not include political analysis. As an American, I have just as much right to be wrong as any one else.

Three is the practice of demanding that journalists must agree with our opinions. I see frequent blog posts deriding well-known columnists, for example, because they do not reach the same conclusions the bloggers have. (In the case of the Iraq war, it happens that, often, the bloggers were right six years ago and the columnists were wrong. See point one.)

We have no right to make such demands. And we must remember that political analysis and commentary (as opposed to reportage) is usually an effort to predict the future. That I was right about the Iraq war (as a private citizen long before I had a public, though little-noticed forum) does not mean that Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, who was wrong about it, is evil.

(There is plenty of evil to go around, certainly, but, despite the fantasies of the blogoshere, very little of it lies at the feet of the main stream media. We all, as a people, allowed ourselves to be duped. We were wrong to allow ourselves to be duped. But evil lies at the feet of the dupees.)

I know this has been a long comment. I’ve unloaded some thoughts that have troubled for sometime.

Oh, yeah. four, regarding the chain of comments following the post, I really see a big disconnect. Mr. Loudell is quite clearly attempting to report what he found an interesting and possibly enlightening way of interpreting the news. It clearly falls in the “opinion” category, and it’s not even his opinion, and to explain that a free market place of ideas involves, well, more than one idea.

I can’t figure out what Mr. Franklin is trying to do except attack Mr. Loudell’s integrity.