Sunday, December 7, 2003

Bias is "Corruption"? The Week in Review section of the Sunday New York Times (registration required) includes an amiably confessional introduction by Daniel Okrent of his role as the paper's new "public editor."  I have admired Okrent's work since he edited the New England Monthly eons ago, and I would be hard pressed to think of a better candidate for his thankless job. Yet I was disappointed by the conventionality of his ringing condemnation of those who are "loath to tolerate interpretations other than their own," and by his lack of self-awareness about the bias that declaration betrays.  Okrent apparently still subscribes to the public ideology of America in the middle of the 20th century.  That civic "religion" was based on faith in the middle ground of compromise among factions, a "center" that was assumed to embody fundamental values about the common good.  Any viewpoint that did not share in those values was held to be "biased" by partisanship or self-interest or--most threateningly--by lack of belief in the whole system. Today Okrent declares, "misfeasance becomes felony when the presentation of news is corrupted by bias...".  Those are strong words, and they flow from a belief that the news can and ought to be presented in pristine form, free of such "corruption."  Yet bias of some sort is inherent in everyone's view of the world.  The practical effect of Okrent's dichotomy is to legitimize a certain set of mainstream beliefs/biases, and to cast others as subversive of the truth. I think history will show the faith in unbiased journalistic "truth" to have been a temporary aberration.  The national papers of Great Britain, like the American press of the 19th century, are popular precisely because of their well-known ideological positions, not from any pretense of neutrality.  They report the news by their own lights, recognizing that readers prefer the news to be filtered through values and beliefs similar to their own. So does The New York Times.  The Times has become America's only truly national, general-interest newspaper because it has the best reporting, writing, and editing in the country...and because its worldview matches that of its target consumers.  It doesn't need to purport to be unbiased.  Okrent believes that his, and presumably the paper's, "only concern" is to be "dispassionate."  It will be enough if he and The Times continue to serve its readers' interests rather than their own. posted by bob @ 7:49 pm | Permanent link

Thursday, December 4, 2003

Speaking of Stereotypes... A short phrase in the movie listings in last Friday's Washington Post caught my eye.  The entry for the film "Kill Bill" described it as "a tale of Old Testament" vengeance."  Of course it's not literally an Old Testament story; the phrase is used as metaphorical shorthand for some sort of pitiless, angry retribution. It turns out that that connotation is remarkably common.  The Economist's issue of November 13 (subscription required) carried an obituary for the art critic David Sylvester which observed, "The descendant of rabbis, he was unreligious, reserving his awe for art and his Old Testament wrath for anyone who transgressed it."  In both cases the phrase is used as if its implication is universal and incontrovertible: that the Hebrew Bible stands for jealous vengeance. That idea is not a fact, however.  It's a Christian polemic, meant to portray a New Testament God of love supplanting the raging, punishing deity supposedly worshipped by the Jews.  In an era that reifies diversity and multiculturalism, it's striking how widely the parochial notion of Christian supersessionism is presented as truth, even though it unmistakeably implies a disparagement of Jewish Scripture.  Maybe these newspapers have forgotten the Old Testament teaching, "Love your neighbor as yourself." The new novel by the penetrating and elegant writer David Guterson, "Our Lady of the Forest," (first chapter here) has a haunting, ominous interior monologue (p. 100) where a character invokes the Old Testament.  "If a brother could hate and slay a brother, why couldn't a father hate a son?  Was there some sort of mythical story for that, something sternly Old Testament?  Abraham arranging Isaac's head on the block in part to placate a bizarre insane God, in part because he enjoyed it?"  Guterson's unsympathetic character is just the sort of person who would reflexively see the God of the Old Testament that way.  Our leading newspapers should not put themselves in his company. posted by bob @ 7:43 am | Permanent link

Tuesday, December 2, 2003

Supporting Public Television The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) usually avoids the pitfalls of stereotyping, but today's piece about PBS by Sally Beatty, on the front page of the Marketing section, is a conspicuous exception.  It overflows with casual characterizations that are unsupported and largely untrue.  It also succumbs to the unfortunate journalistic habit of refuting a proposition that hasn't been asserted except by the writer. It starts with the reefer on the paper's front page, where we are told that PBS is "famous for serving up a heady diet of symphonic strings and musing intellectuals."  Is it really a heady experience to watch intellectuals muse?  How many symphonies (which, by the way, also have woodwinds and brass and percussion) are actually broadcast on PBS?  Not many.  But Beatty can't be held responsible for the uninformed exuberance of a blurb-writer. She is responsible, though, for blithely characterizing PBS as "the high-brow Public Broadcasting Service."  Since when?  PBS programming consists mostly of shows like Sesame Street, the Teletubbies, nature shows, news, documentaries, and costume dramas.  She describes the network as "cerebral" only to make the case that fund-raising specials starring Yanni or Suze Orman or Deepak Chopra are inconsistent with the usual character of the network. Maybe they are.  But they have dependably attracted donations year after year, so it makes sense that public-TV executives continue to air them.  Underlying this story is one of the stock narratives of the baby-boomer generation: the alleged sellout of ideals to make a buck.  The thing is, PBS never claimed to be cerebral in the first place.  Sally Beatty has set up PBS, first by imputing a highbrow character to public television and then by implying a betrayal of that character. Yanni and Chopra have been used in local public-TV pledge drives for years, so this hardly qualifies as news at the end of 2003.  The real question is, what does it say about the viewing audience that these shows are such sure-fire fund-raisers, and regular shows like the Jim Lehrer Newshour are not?  Maybe PBS is financially challenged because it doesn't normally broadcast the kind of shows that would be most popular.  If that's true, and I think it is, the real story is PBS's continued support for its mission-based programming in the face of strong financial incentives to offer lowbrow entertainment and self-help shows year-round.  Unfortunately, in its eagerness to find another example of idealists selling out, the Wall Street Journal got the story exactly backwards. posted by bob @ 5:04 am | Permanent link