Hey,
MSM: All Journalism is Advocacy Journalism
By Matt Taibbi
"Rolling Stone" - So New York Times Dealbook writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has apologized to journalist Glenn Greenwald for saying he'd "almost arrest" him, for his supposed aid and comfort of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. "I veered into hyperbole," was Sorkin's explanation.
By Matt Taibbi
"Rolling Stone" - So New York Times Dealbook writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has apologized to journalist Glenn Greenwald for saying he'd "almost arrest" him, for his supposed aid and comfort of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. "I veered into hyperbole," was Sorkin's explanation.
I got into
trouble the other day on Twitter for asking if David Gregory may
have just had a "brain fart" when he asked Greenwald his
infamous question, "To the extent that you have aided and
abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't
you be charged with a crime?" I hadn't seen the show and had
only read the quote, and quite frankly, I don't watch a lot of
David Gregory. Apparently, in context, even the question I asked
is absurd (more on that later). But Sorkin is different. For
Sorkin to call his outburst an accident, that I know is
hilarious.
Did he
also "veer into" a long career as a shameless, ball-gargling
prostitute for Wall Street? As Jeff Cohen eloquently
pointed out on HuffPo, isn't Sorkin the guy who's
always
bragging about how close he is to top bankers and parroting
their views on things? This is a man who
admitted, in print, that he only went down to Zucotti Park
after a bank C.E.O. asked him, "Is this Occupy thing a big
deal?"
(Sorkin's
reassuring response: "As I wandered around the park, it was
clear to me that most bankers probably don't have to worry about
being in imminent personal danger . . .")
And when
Senator Carl Levin's report about Goldman's "Big Short" and
deals like Abacus and Timberwolf came out, it was Sorkin who
released a
lengthy screed in Dealbook defending Goldman, one I
instantly recognized as being
nearly indistinguishable from the excuses I'd heard from
Goldman's own P.R. people.
But the
biggest clue that Sorkin's take on Greenwald was no accident
came in the rest of that same Squawk Box appearance
(emphasis mine):
I feel like, A, we've screwed this up, even letting him get to Russia. B, clearly the Chinese hate us to even let him out of the country.I would arrest him . . . and now I would almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who's the journalist who seems to want to help him get to Ecuador.
We? Wow.
That's a scene
straight out of Malcolm X. ("What's the
matter, boss, we sick?") As a journalist, when you start
speaking about political power in the first person plural, it's
pretty much glue-factory time.
The irony
of all of this is that this whole discussion is taking place in
a phony "debate" that's now being cooked up about the legitimacy
of advocacy journalism, which is exactly what Sorkin practices
when he goes down to Zucotti Park on behalf of a bank CEO or
when he talks about how "we" screwed up, letting Snowden out of
the country. Preposterously, they've made the debate about Glenn
Greenwald, who absolutely does practice advocacy journalism. But
to pretend he's the only one is lunacy.
All journalism is advocacy
journalism. No matter how it's presented, every report by every
reporter advances someone's point of view. The advocacy can be
hidden, as it is in the monotone narration of a news anchor for
a big network like CBS or NBC (where the biases of advertisers
and corporate backers like GE are disguised in a thousand subtle
ways), or it can be out in the open, as it proudly is with
Greenwald, or graspingly with Sorkin, or institutionally with a
company like Fox.
But to
pretend there's such a thing as journalism without advocacy is
just silly; nobody in this business really takes that concept
seriously. "Objectivity" is a fairy tale invented purely for the
consumption of the credulous public, sort of like the Santa
Claus myth. Obviously, journalists can strive to be balanced and
objective, but that's all it is, striving.
Try as
hard as you want, a point of view will come forward in your
story. Open any newspaper from the Thirties or Forties, check
the sports page; the guy who wrote up the box score, did he have
a political point of view? He probably didn't think so. But
viewed with 70 or 80 years of hindsight, covering a baseball
game where blacks weren't allowed to play without mentioning the
fact, that's apology and advocacy. Any journalist with half a
brain knows that the biases of our time are always buried in our
coverage.
Like many
others, in my career I decided early on that I'd rather be out
in the open about my opinions, and let readers know what my
biases are to the extent that I can. I recognize, however, that
there's value in the other kind of reporting, where papers like
the Times strive to take personal opinions out of the
coverage and shoot for a "Just the facts, Ma'am" style. The
value there is that people trust that approach, and readers
implicitly enter into a contract with the newspaper or TV
station that takes it, assuming that the organization will
honestly try to show all points of view dispassionately.
Some
organizations do a great job of that, but others often violate
that contract, and carefully choose which "Just facts" to
present and which ones to ignore, so as to put certain political
or financial interests in a better light. But that doesn't mean
the approach per se is illegitimate. It's just different.
What's
frightening now is that we suddenly have talk from people who
ought to know better, not only advancing the childish lie that
Glenn Greenwald and his ilk are the world's only advocacy
journalists, but also that the legitimacy of such journalists is
even in question.
Gregory, I
later found out, shamelessly went there in his exchange with
Greenwald, saying, "Well, the question of who's a journalist may
be up to a debate with regards to what you're doing."
But even
crazier was
a subsequent Washington Post article, also cited by
Cohen, entitled "On NSA disclosures, has Glenn Greenwald become
something other than a reporter?" The article was
unintentionally comic and surrealistic because despite writer
Paul Farhi's above-the-fray tone, the mere decision to write
such a piece is a classic demonstration of the aforementioned
brand of hidden-bias, non-advocacy advocacy.
I mean,
why not write exactly the same piece, but ask whether Andrew
Ross Sorkin or David Gregory in this scandal has become
something other than a reporter? One could make exactly the same
argument using the behaviors of those two as the hook. The
editorial decision to make it about Glenn was therefore a major
piece of advocacy, despite the "agnostic" language employed in
the piece (straight-news editors love the term "agnostic" and
hilariously often think it applies to them, when in fact they
usually confine their doubts to permitted realms of thought).
The
Post piece was full of the usual chin-scratching claptrap
about whether it's appropriate for journalists to have opinions,
noting that "the line between journalism – traditionally, the
dispassionate reporting of facts – and outright involvement in
the news seems blurrier than ever."
This is
crazy – news organizations are always involved in the
news. Just ask the citizens of Iraq, who wouldn't have spent the
last decade in a war zone had every TV network in America not
credulously cheered the White House on when it blundered and
bombed its way into Baghdad on bogus WMD claims. Ask Howard
Dean, whom I watched being driven literally bonkers by the
endless questions posed by "dispassionate" reporters about
whether or not he was "too left" or "too strident" to be
president, questions they were being spoon-fed in bars along the
campaign trail late at night by Democratic Party hacks who
resented the fact that Dean went through outside channels (i.e.
the Internet) to get campaign funding, and in his speeches was
calling out the Dems' pathetic cave-in on the Iraq issue.
Even worse
was this quote in the Post piece from a University
professor:
Edward Wasserman, dean of the University of California at Berkeley's journalism school, said having a "social commitment" doesn't disqualify anyone from being a journalist. But the public should remain skeptical of reporters who are also advocates. "Do we know if he's pulling his punches or has his fingers on the scale because some information that should he should be reporting doesn't fit [with his cause]?" Wasserman asked in an interview. "If that's the case, he should be castigated."
Wasserman,
the piece pointed out, noted that he hadn't seen such cause for
alarm in Greenwald's case. But even so, his opinion is
astonishing. We should be skeptical of reporters who are
advocates, because they might be pulling punches to advance a
cause?
Well . . .
that's true. But only if we're talking about all reporters,
because all reporters are advocates. If we're only talking about
people like Glenn Greenwald, who are open about their advocacy,
that's a crazy thing to say. People should be skeptical of
everything they read. In fact, people should be more
skeptical of reporters who claim not to be advocates, because
those people are almost always lying, whether they know it or
not.
The truly
scary thing about all of this is that we're living in an age
where some very strange decisions are being made about who
deserves rights, and who doesn't. Someone shooting at an
American soldier in Afghanistan (or who is even alleged to have
done so) isn't really a soldier, and therefore isn't really
protected by the Geneva Conventions, and therefore can be
whisked away for life to some extralegal detention center. We
can kill some Americans by drone attacks without trial because
they'd ceased to have rights once they become enemy combatants,
a determination made not collectively but by some Star Chamber
somewhere.
Some
people apparently get the full human-rights coverage; some
people on the other end aren't really 100 percent people, so
they don't.
That's
what makes this new debate about Greenwald and advocacy
journalism so insidious. Journalists of all kinds have long
enjoyed certain legal protections, and those protections are
essential to a functioning free press. The easiest way around
those protections is simply to declare some people "not
journalists." Ten years ago, I would have thought the idea is
crazy, but now any journalist would be nuts not to worry about
it. Who are these people to decide who's a journalist and who
isn't? Is there anything more obnoxious than a priesthood?
No comments:
Post a Comment