He Jests at Scars ...
Dear Jack,
The thing I find most disheartening about Rosen's book is probably best
summed up by an oft-used Shakespeare line: "He jests at scars that never felt a
wound." That is: Rosen's writing and thinking betrays almost no familiarity
with what is actually required to produce good journalism. He criticizes
reporters (mostly political reporters) who maintain that an adversarial
relationship with government is healthy, believing instead that some fabled
cooperation with civic groups would be better.
But what about when the adversarial relationship comes from government
itself? Here's one example from my backyard: Shortly after taking office, the
Giuliani administration in New York began stonewalling the most routine media
requests for information. In one instance, a department denied a request by the
New York Daily News , made under the local Freedom of Information law,
for a list of all investigations commenced by an agency in the previous year.
Just a list--as had been provided by every previous administration in recent
memory.
What're the reporter and city editor supposed to do? Go to the publisher,
and hope that the relationship will be healed through some kind of feel-good
civic project between the paper and the mayor? Given the politically corrupt
relationship that exists between the News ' publisher and the mayor,
that'd be the worst possible journalistic outcome. To its credit, the Daily
News sued, and only under court order did the administration provide the
information as it was legally required to provide.
That's an ugly and uncivil process, but it's also, under the circumstances,
the best way to serve the public interest. Rosen's worldview is so far removed
from actual journalistic practice that it can't even imagine such a scenario,
much less grasp its importance.
I'll conclude by trying to give an answer to the book's title question. One
thing that journalists should be for is independence. In my view, that doesn't
require "objectivity" or neutrality or being boring or being good
citizens--though it doesn't preclude any of those things either. It means
simply that the task of gathering and presenting news must be kept as separate
as humanly possible from pretty much everything: government, interest groups,
and the publisher's own business plans. Rosen's book demonstrates so little
understanding of that core journalistic value that it paints itself out of the
picture.
Best,
Jim
