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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul_philp who wrote (35260)	7/29/2002 3:12:50 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I think it appears to you this way because you align to some degree with the stories that get covered. Absolutely not. I read Bob Novak regularly and consider his reporting excellent; I consider Safire's Times columns, quite often, to be wonderful instances of inside reporting from the Bush administration and its Republican critics; I consider the investigative reporting in The Wall Street Journal to be top notch, perhaps the best being done right now. In short, I think you can find good journalism across the board; and you can definitely find bad journalism across the board. Good journalism is not "objective" journalism; it is journalism committed to getting the story right. Since all of us are wonderfully situated in the world with all the trappings of social beings, none of us stand outside the social, we bring our perspectives, etc. to it. But we should try not to be limited by them; we should try to imagine that "getting the story right" in our lives as citizens might entail something that runs against our political beliefs. We should try to see the story from as many other vantage points as possible. You seem to be implying that only rightie people would consider practising political instrumentality. Are you suggesting that leftie people in the media operate at a morally higher level? This would become a self-confirming opinion if help very long. Definitely not. I'm not implying it, I'm arguing against it. I'm saying that media institutions which are brought into being in order to foster a political point of view do bad journalism, right or left. And if we give in to the impulse to think that the only important thing about journalism is its political point of view, we push the balkanization bit a little further down the road toward fruition.