Las Vegas editor suggests forgetting about objectivity
Sunday, December 01, 2002
COLUMN: Thomas Mitchell
Professional introspection or radical heresy?
Yes, I have uttered journalistic heresy.
It was at the final session of a conference attended by several dozen scribes and journalism profs gathered to cogitate on the woes of the media. Corporate consolidation of news outlets. Declining circulation. Declining viewership. General distrust of the media. Apathy toward news.
Annoyed with the near universal assumption that if we just tweaked the spark plugs a bit we could turn around this great, lumbering ship of journalism, I suggested it just might be time to kick out of bed the practice to which we've been wedded for the past century: Objectivity.
It is a perversion of human nature. Nobody can be truly objective.
I pointed to marketing surveys by all the big media corporations that startlingly discover the public has little appetite for political news, resulting in suggestions the news media cut back on its coverage of politics. To which I reply, maybe it isn't that the public doesn't care for politics. Maybe it is that you cover politics in such a boring, middle-of-the-road, noncommittal fashion that it induces yawns instead of yelps.
Why not come out swinging from an unabashed point of view? Use judgment. Take a stance. Challenge preconceptions.
OK, I flirted with the concept. I lusted in my heart. But never consummated. The Review-Journal still tries to be objective, just not boring.
What beckons this bit of professional introspection, you ask?
Saturday was the 167th birthday of the putative father of Nevada journalism.
Every time I reread a few chapters from his book "Roughing It," about those formative years, Mark Twain gives me those kick-over-the-traces ideas.
At the Nevada Press Association office in Carson City hangs a plaque: "After trying his luck at prospecting, Mark Twain began his literary career in earnest while writing stories for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City. He developed and polished his writing style while on the staff of the famous newspaper. Twain believed that people, not facts, make news, and he always played up the human-interest side of a story. He came to the Territory of Nevada in 1861 and left three years later."
Leaving an indelible mark.
I asked McAvoy Layne, the Northern Nevadan who has made a career of impersonating the inimitable author, for some of his favorite Twainisms so I could slur a few lines as we tippled together Saturday on opposite ends of the state.
Layne found this exuberant account of Virginia City: "Virginia had grown to be the `livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever produced. ... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen." Twain followed with a reporter's litany: "wide-open gambling-palaces, political pow-wows, civic processions, street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whisky-mill every fifteen steps ... a dozen breweries, and half a dozen jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church."
My favorite passage of Twain reportage has to be: "Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter, and the stranger began to explain with another. When the pistols were emptied, the stranger resumed his work (mending a whiplash), and Mr. Harris rode by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through one of his lungs, and several in his hips; and from them issued little rivulets of blood that coursed down the horse's sides and made the animal look quite picturesque. I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it recalled to mind that first day in Carson."
This was Twain on newspapers: "We are told that they are irreverent, coarse, vulgar, ribald. I hope they will remain irreverent. I would like that irreverence to be preserved in America forever and ever-irreverence for all royalties and all those titled creatures born into privilege."
Despite his penchant for embellishment and fabrication, his booming journalistic voice makes an editor entertain heresies.
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