OFF MESSAGE
A Media Supreme
By William Powers, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Within seconds of the president's Tuesday-night announcement of his Supreme Court pick, John G. Roberts Jr., the media went into turbodrive.
By the wee hours of Wednesday morning, there were 2,582 Roberts stories from around the world on offer at Google News. Journalists are not very popular these days, but nobody can say that they don't work hard.
But do they work well? A high-pressure story like this is a brutal test of the quality of our product. This whole business is under the microscope now, and media folk are well aware of it. Every false move takes us down another notch, and there aren't many notches left.
So within minutes of the news breaking, the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based organization whose Web site is a kind of media clubhouse, had posted a Web page of practical tips for "Covering Judge Roberts," including such basics as: "Avoid the passive voice; 'considered conservative' doesn't tell the reader or listener who considers the person conservative."
As the Roberts story washes over us, a few more reminders to stick on the media's fridge:
1. Bias Is the Elephant. And it's very much in the room. Despite conservative claims to the contrary, mainstream outlets now work hard to get any liberalish tilt out of their coverage of Republican nominees. But they don't always succeed. A few weeks ago, for instance, a Time magazine story on the Court vacancy began, "Over the past decade, parental-notification rules, mandatory waiting periods, and other state restrictions have steadily chipped away at a woman's right to abortion." There's no single word you can point to there that screams, "pro-choice," but the last 10 are certainly a stage whisper.
Many well-meaning media-watchers believe that the goal should be absolute objective purity, but to me, that isn't human. Organizations are made up of people, people have leanings, and those leanings will always to some degree shade the choice of language and visuals. Fox News now regularly does what the networks have done for years -- lets unmistakable code words and signals slip into the coverage, albeit of the opposite tincture.
Why not acknowledge the elephant? Talk about it in the news product, bring readers in on the struggle, make the bias question an occasional sidebar to the Roberts coverage. A really bold newspaper editor (any out there?) might send out two reporters of opposite ideological persuasions to cover one day of the confirmation hearings. Have each write a news story, and run them side by side, labeled as to leaning. Leave off the bylines, if you like. This idea may seem a little cute and professionally self-absorbed, but you know what? People would read it, and be impressed that you were wrestling with the bias question, instead of pretending it isn't there.
2. Chaos Is Good. There's a widespread fear that the explosion of news sources will make this fight even uglier than previous ones. The Los Angeles Times noted that it "will be the first such battle of the Internet age, with its legions of bloggers, and the first of the new age of media polarization -- with phalanxes of partisan commentators on competing all-news cable channels."
But the madness has a massive upside. The Internet has widened and deepened the pool of information available to news consumers. In the last big nasty confirmation, 1991's Clarence Thomas brawl, the public was dependent on old-fashioned print and broadcast news, plus newer cable options. Thus, the furious ideological struggle that framed and drove that story came at consumers secondhand, through the filter of Washington journalists.
Now, thanks to the Web, people can shop and compare for themselves. Most helpfully, they can go directly to the Web sites of the interest groups and blog warriors, and read the competing propaganda. It's easier to make judgments about the news when you've seen some of the raw material.
It's also wrong to assume that the profusion of sources diminishes the mainstream media's importance. It does exactly the opposite. One of the most useful functions of establishment outlets today is the way they vet and organize all the stuff flying around at the lower tiers, particularly among the blogs and the ideo-lobbies.
3. Cut the Bellyaching. Stories like this bring out the schoolmarm in the media. The second the punches start flying, journalists are slapping the big ruler on the desk, hyperventilating about "partisan rancor" and the death of democracy. There's obvious hypocrisy in this cycle: We set the battle up with our breathless headlines, and once it takes off, we rush in to disapprove of it. Any journalist worthy of the name craves discord and rancor. Let's be as honest about this as Joel Achenbach was on his Washington Post blog a few days ago: "Roberts is a disappointing nominee in some regards, because he's not in-your-face, Bork-like reactionary, and thus he doesn't seem likely to face an apocalyptic confirmation battle. Summer just got duller. It's like you plan for a party, and it fizzles, and you think: What are we going to do with all this cocktail shrimp?"
4. Delete SCOTUS. It's the dumbest acronym to catch on in years, and it's growing like a cancer on the media. In The New York Times, William Safire traced it back to a wire-service code from 1879. Post columnist Anne Applebaum tagged it an affectation of Beltway hipsters. "Supreme Court" is elegant, concise and accurate -- qualities everyone in the media could use a little more of right now.
-- William Powers is a columnist for National Journal magazine, where "Off Message" appears. His e-mail address is bpowers@nationaljournal.com.
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