This morning the NY Times brings us a gripping dialogue betwixt journalism's traditionalist Bill Keller and activist Glenn Greenwald on "the future of news," a kind of Brooks-Collins meditation without the whimsy. I seldom pronounce an item that I find fascinating a "must-read" for others, but upon reading this one, you'll understand, I think, today's exception. This is vital stuff, and as such it gets to the core of some fundamentally honest differences--not so much between journalism's role, as its rollout.
Their respective corners are familiar, but for those of you who haven't the time for seven pugilistic pages of review, I'm reducing Greenwald's and Keller's below. Writes the former:
[The standard] model has ... produced lots of atrocious journalism and some toxic habits that are weakening the profession. A journalist who is petrified of appearing to express any opinions will often steer clear of declarative sentences about what is true, opting instead for a cowardly and unhelpful "here’s-what-both-sides-say-and-I-won’t-resolve-the-conflicts" formulation.
Far more than concerns about ideological bias, the collapse of media credibility stems from things like helping the U.S. government disseminate falsehoods that led to the Iraq War and, more generally, a glaring subservience to political power: pathologies exacerbated by the reportorial ban on any making clear, declarative statements about the words and actions of political officials out of fear that one will be accused of bias.
[M]y primary point: all journalism is subjective and a form of activism even if an attempt is made to pretend that this isn’t so.
Then Keller:
It seems more plausible to me that the erosion of respect for American media--a category that includes everything from my paper to USA Today to Rush Limbaugh to The National Enquirer to If-it-bleeds-it-leads local newscasts--can be explained by the fact that so much of it is trivial, shallow, sensational, redundant and, yes, ideological and polemical.
My reductionism is far from comprehensive, hence essentially unfair to both arguments. Again, a full reading is encouraged. I've shorted Keller his due, mostly in the interest of space, but also because it has been represented for so long in mainstream journalism it is in less need of exposition.
So who, in my opinion, is right? Both Greenwald and Keller, for both men make claims based on assumptions of honorable, professional behavior and genuine intent. Perhaps this is that element of this democratic socialist's ineradicable conservatism peeping out--that is, my belief that some traditions are worthy traditions merely by virtue of their proven serviceability and the violent collapse of other approaches--but I'd give the edge to Keller, for one simple, and for me primal, reason: Greenwald's moralism scares the hell out of me.
Indeed anyone's moralism scares the hell out of me. I distrust even the concept. Contrary to its claims of universality, moralism is deeply personal and thus idiosyncratic. Humans construct it bit by bit, day by day, event by event and encounter by encounter--notwithstanding received and presumably cherished wisdom from external sources, such as the ecclesiastical. Greenwald righteously protests that he presents journalism for the greater good and with an informed partiality and in a deeper search for "the truth," and for all I know he protests authentically. Yet Glenn Beck protests the same. And absent underlying sources of unopinionated knowledge and facts--such as Keller's--I can't possibly know whose ideological story--i.e., politics reduced to personal morality--to buy. Which means I require precisely what Greenwald rejects: the "here’s-what-both-sides-say-and-I-won’t-resolve-the-conflicts" kind of journalism.
In other words Keller's, it seems to me, is at least an indispensable starting point. I gloomily imagine a journalistic world brimming with crusading Greenwalds--and no others.