But I’ve never read a rethink-objectivity argument quite like Steve Buttry’s recent post on the subject. The language he uses is unexpected — and gets at the heart of why objectivity-at-all-costs is ultimately misguided.

Buttry’s post is a response to a Society of Professional Journalists memo urging journalists in Haiti “to avoid blurring the lines between being a participant and being an objective observer.” On balance I agree with his view on the SPJ memo, but leave the Haiti specifics aside for a moment. Read what Buttry says about objectivity in general (bolded emphases mine; italics are my blog template’s blockquote style):

[T]he notion of objectivity is a fig leaf for journalists who don’t want to deal honestly with our own humanity and don’t want to take personal responsibility for the human impact of our journalism. We’re just doing our jobs. We’re just being objective. Objects can’t be responsible.

Journalism is practiced by flesh-and-blood people with families and pulses. We can and should uphold professional standards such as fairness and accuracy and verification. But when we deny our humanity, we lie to our readers. And sometimes we miss the story.

You don’t often see objectivity described in these terms, but he’s right.

Denying one’s humanity. Lying. Avoiding personal responsibility for the sake of said lies: This is the language of pathology.

From this perspective, objectivity’s insidiousness becomes clearer. The pathology manifests itself not just in stories that might engage a journalist emotionally, but also and far more commonly in stories that engage (or should engage) a journalist intellectually.

Here’s Chait in that touchstone 2002 piece about Bias (same emphasis explanation as above):

[F]or the mainstream media, being even-handed usually means treating respectfully the reigning view in each party. … One consequence of this bias, as I’ve written in these pages before, is that the press feels obliged to take seriously even those policy claims that are empirically false.

That is, political journalists often know a statement is false or misleading but print it without qualification — knowingly participating in a lie to readers — for the sake of notions of objectivity.

When the good-intentioned pursuit of truth leads the truth-seekers to lie (to themselves, to readers; by inclusion or omission) rather than break their code, there’s probably something wrong with the code.

This pathological objectivity has become so harmful to civic life that President Obama made it a key part of Wednesday’s State of the Union address. (Though to be fair, his comments about the media apply equally or moreso to Fox News’ and various pundits’ plain old, not-even-ostensibly-objective pathological lies). Indeed, Obama’s Q&A session with Republicans on Friday was so riveting because we’re not used to seeing politicians’ empirically false claims get refuted publicly in real time.

The alternative, as many have pointed out, isn’t for journalists to say exactly what they think about everything they write or edit. Part of being a socialized adult, after all, is knowing when it’s appropriate to offer your opinion or keep it to yourself (there’s that common sense again).

Rather, a healthy journalism and healthy public discourse — not to mention healthy journalists — are better served by a professional-intellectual framework of honesty, transparency, and expertise (or, in Dan Gillmor’s formulation, thoroughness/accuracy/fairness/transparency) than by one ultimately built on lies and extreme cognitive dissonance.

——–

* It was before blogs so there’s no online record, but I have a college newspaper column proving I was on the rethink-objectivity bandwagon back in 2002!

Many smaller newspapers have had their printing done by contract for years. Headlines have come recently, however, as big-city newspapers (think San Francisco, Boston and now New York) explore outsourcing or consolidating printing, even in the absence of a joint operating agreement. Chains such as McClatchy and Media News are also consolidating printing, even if it means earlier deadlines and longer truck routes.

They should go one step further: Move their printing operations into a separate subsidiary with no ties to the newsroom. Newsrooms would pay to print the paper and be free to take their business to a less expensive or more responsive competitor.

This would get the albatross of “big iron’s” debt and depreciation off newsrooms’ backs. It would position those printing operations better for sale. And it would make the pressroom and the newsroom more efficient in accounting for costs and generating new business.

I would go even a step beyond that.

If, as David Sullivan wrote a couple months ago, “newspapers are essentially a logistics business that happens to employ journalists”; and if, as Fisher writes, “Newsrooms need an honest accounting of the costs and revenues associated with producing, distributing and selling the news,” selling off the press is only half a solution. Here’s a possible other half:

Newspapers should get out of the delivery business and send papers through the mail.

Leave aside, for a moment, the new logistical issues this would create. In his post, Fisher imagines the conversations that might go on if newspapers didn’t have to worry about presses:

“Given the cost, we can only afford limited space in print. But for smaller marginal cost, we can expand it with multimedia, maps, online chats, etc. Several experts blog on that; let’s see if we can get them into the mix.” But for another story it might be: “That’s better for print where readers can have more time with it and it fits our “print” demographic more closely; let’s take some time on that and see what we can do to augment it online.” Or it might even be: “We can’t afford to cover that, but what community resources do we have that can help us?”

Now imagine the conversation if newsrooms also didn’t have to worry (or had to worry less) about delivery:

“Well, the paper won’t reach readers until the afternoon, or until they get home from work in the evening. But that’s ok — readers have been telling us for years that they don’t have time in the morning. Anyway, most of the paper is old news by the time it hits readers’ driveways. So let’s try to take advantage of our new time delay. We’ll put most of the breaking or one-sentence news on our web site where it belongs and put more explanatory, contextual stuff in the paper. So when people get home they can read about why the stuff they heard about during the day is important, what it means. And since we no longer have to pad the paper with instantly outdated news, it’ll be both a more streamlined and a more informative, surprising read than before.”

This wouldn’t work for all papers at once; it could be too abrupt for areas with, say, heavily older demographics or for papers with limited web sites. But for bigger city papers and papers with robust sites and strong online readership, getting out of the delivery business would force a necessary psychological shift for both newsrooms and consumers — that print is no longer the proper medium for much of the current content — as much as it would herald a business shift.

Now back to the logistics. First, you’d still need to deliver the papers from the plant to post offices, but potential cost savings here seem considerable. Take the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a random example. The Post-Dispatch has a daily circulation of 255,000; there are 639 post offices in St. Louis, and let’s conservatively double that to account for the entire metro area. Delivering papers to 1,200 post offices versus to 255,000 individuals or businesses (or even to — again conservatively — 150,000 separate locations if some are delivered as bundles to machines and store racks) is quite a difference. That’s not even mentioning the reduced emissions achieved by sending papers out on mail trucks’ existing routes instead of via separate fleets.

Could the postal service handle an influx of daily newspapers? I can’t answer that without doing some more research. But according to the USPS web site, new equipment and a 22 percent drop in the amount of first-class mail since 1998 have created “excess processing capacity at many postal facilities where mail is canceled and sorted.” It seems like some of those extra resources could be used to help sort daily papers, creating a win-win for the USPS — excess capacity is no longer idle, and new revenues start coming in from newspapers paying for postage.

Sending newspapers through the mail would take the American newspaper industry full circle back to its beginnings. As Paul Starr recounts in his excellent 2004 book The Creation of the Media, America had “an early edge [versus European countries] in newspapers and newspaper reading” because the government subsidized papers with discounted postal rates (while European countries taxed papers) and let papers be sent from any post office (while papers in Europe mostly had to be sent from capitals). The result? By 1830, the postal service carried “2 million more newspapers than letters. In 1832, newspapers made up 95 percent of the weight of postal communication and only 15 percent of the revenue.” In this respect, newspapers should return to their roots.

One big stumbling block to this proposal: Sunday papers. In the medium to long term, Sunday papers could give up the charade and get delivered on Fridays — by which time all but a few pages of most current Sunday papers are finished — with any breaking weekend news being posted on the web site. In addition to reducing logistical/delivery costs, this would free papers to better utilize or further reduce weekend shell staffing (by “reduce” I mean “allow people to work a normal week,” not “fire weekend workers.”) In the short term, I’m not sure how to get around the Sunday paper problem. But continuing non-USPS delivery one day a week, even given Sundays’ typically higher circulation, should still save quite a bit compared to seven-day delivery.

Again, I haven’t done enough research to know if this is viable. I also know I’m not the first to suggest this; Sullivan broached the topic in the post I mentioned above, and Jeff Jarvis wrote last month that newspapers “should get out of the printing business.” But Fisher’s post was one of the first I’ve seen detailing what getting out of the printing business might actually entail and accomplish.

Even though a mailed newspaper that puts most of its breaking news online is more of a leap than I probably believe is possible for the time being, it’s a potentially key step in getting newspapers out of the logistics business. And as an interim step between now and an all-online future, it could be psychologically (if not financially) even more significant than off-loading the printing press.

I want the Freedom Forum to sell off their monument valley installation and use the proceeds to actually support journalism. Like endowing a newspaper, for instance.

Just one newspaper? Those were the days. Nowadays — a mere five months later, that is — $450 million could get you 3 or 4 newspaper chains.

A columnist or feature can occasionally be hip; but a newspaper can’t be hip. It can’t be the counterculture. It is the culture. It has been part of how new ideas are absorbed into the mainstream. …

But it can be hard to find one’s place in the culture, which grows more complicated by the day; the Internet, with its social networking and postings and chat, provides a new counterculture, or multiple ones, ones that make the mainstream look even lamer than “The Family Circus” did to me in the 1970s. The argument about the future of news is partly about whether the mainstream ends with the baby boomers, like the parents left behind in “Childhood’s End” as the children join the ubermind.

The problem is that newspapers have tended to do a poor job of figuring out how to satisfy both the Family Circus and the more modern audiences. Plus the younger mainstream audience is still hipper and savvier than the Baby Boomer Family Circus audience. But Sullivan’s point is well taken.

I first became aware of the post-CompuServe Internet when my brother was in college, circa 1992. I was so excited that he somehow had access to all the important information I couldn’t find anywhere else: namely, the special moves for Street Fighter II. I think Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam secrets were also big on my list of Net-procured info, but Street Fighter was the main treasure.

I remember my brother mentioning Archie and Veronica — two early search engines — and I had no idea what he was talking about, though I must have used one or both to find the video game tricks. Oddly enough, I don’t remember the first time I used a Web browser. In my memory, browsers just exist after a point.

Anyway, here are some interesting bits from the Vanity Fair piece…

Marc Andreessen (Mosaic/Netscape/Ning maven), on making a graphical program to access the Internet:

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but at the time, that was an original idea. When we were working on Mosaic during Christmas break between 1992 and 1993, I went out at like four in the morning to a 7-Eleven to get something to eat, and there was the first issue of Wired on the shelf. I bought it. In it there’s all this science-fiction stuff. The Internet’s not mentioned. Even in Wired.

My first thought after reading that was, Then what the heck was in the first issue of Wired? But after a quick glance at the first issue, I see that Andreessen is maybe exaggerating just a tad. (The Wired article that does mention the Internet — possibly a library/academic version if you want to be charitable toward Andreessen’s memory — includes this pre-file-sharing sentiment that’s either prescient or quaint [italics added]: “If someday in the future anybody can get an electronic copy of any book from a library free of charge, why should anyone ever set foot in a bookstore again?”)

In the unheeded-visionary department, we have two gems. First is Silicon Graphics/Netscape Communications founder Jim Clark:

One of the things that struck me at that early embryonic state was that the Internet was going to mutate the newspaper industry, was going to change the classified-ad business, and change the music business. And so I went around and met with Rolling Stone magazine. I met with the Times Mirror Company, Time Warner. We demonstrated how you could play music over this thing, how you could shop for records, shop for CDs. We demonstrated a bunch of shopping applications. We wanted to show the newspapers what they were going to undergo.

Ummm, good thing there were so many media folks who paid attention to people like Jim Clark.

Then there’s Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, who had an even more specific pitch/warning for newspapers:

The media people essentially did not think the Internet would be important or disruptive. In 1996, I got together the C.E.O.’s of 9 of the 10 major newspaper companies in America in a single room to propose something called the New Century Network. It was the C.E.O.’s of The Washington Post and The New York Times and Gannett and Times Mirror and Tribune and I forget who else. They couldn’t convince themselves that a Google, a Yahoo, or an eBay would be important, or that eBay could ever replace classified advertising.

The luddite ignorance would almost be funny if not for the current havoc that stems pretty much directly — albeit a decade in the making — from said ignorance.

Of course, the Internet being the Internet (i.e. awesome), I also came across two posts today that show how far ahead of the technology curve journalists are in many respects.

First (via the always-excellent Hitsville) is a story from the Arizona Republic about a fight between Phoenix’s mayor and a county sheriff. In the course of reciprocal investigations, the sheriff sought six months worth of Phoenix officials’ e-mails. Can you guess how the information was delivered? No — not by burning the material on a CD. That would be too easy and cheap! Instead, they printed out more than 10,000 pages and scanned them, costing $2,000 in taxpayer money. (Though as Bill Wyman points out at Hitsville, the paper somehow construed this as saving taxpayers money.)

And finally, we come to this fully reassuring quote from a John McCain campaign official (via The Plank):

You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country. … John McCain is aware of the Internet.

I can see the bumper sticker now: “McCain in ’08: He kinda sorta knows about that Internet thingy!”

Wyman, who notes that he gets three newspapers a day, gives a brutal assessment of one edition of the Arizona Republic’s “Arizona Living” section — which includes such interesting stories as “Free burrito for teachers, ” “Post office food drive,” and “Fight Crohn’s and colitis” as well as

a short filler AP item (“Jump-start day sweetly, swiftly”) about how the Tootsie Roll company has a new product: “Maxxed Energy Pops, a cleverly packed energy drink in the form of a lollipop.” It’s almost hard to believe that life forms above the level of a somewhat dense tree sloth took part in the selection, editing, hed-writing and publishing of that piece of prose.

Yowza. I’m always wary of hyperlocal pushes because of the danger that papers will end up with lots of lame community-newsletter fluff like this. Of course there are ways to do hyperlocal that don’t result in stories-as-boring-calendar-items; Wyman himself suggests a much better approach to one of the Arizona Living stories. So let his post be a warning to journalists everywhere, hyperlocal or otherwise. Please, please, don’t end up like this:

It’s clear that everyone involved long ago had any bit of originality or innovation beaten out of them. They know that they can’t go wrong producing and designing the page to appeal to some imaginary doddering grandmother, so they scour the day’s press releases and then sit around and brainstorm to zero in on the bloodless, the trivial, and the utterly mundane.

Why not get political news from a political news outlet, movie reviews from a place that specializes in movies, and local news from an organization that’s really passionate about covering its community rather than viewing it as a JV form of journalism to be endured before moving on to something bigger?

Gahran identifies a number of attitudes that “directly cut off options [for change] from consideration” and can lead to a “toxic” newsroom culture. She also articulates what, to my mind, is turning out to be the central problem with objectivity-era mainstream journalism:

Journalists (more so than most other professions) are supposed to be fundamentally curious and profoundly interested in what’s happening around them.

An apparent lack of curiosity shows up in today’s newspapers in the form of ignorant political journalism, stories written straight from press releases and PR pitches, stories that treat technology and consumer electronics as alien subjects. It shows up inside newsrooms in the form of old-timers who still aren’t comfortable with computers, new-timers who’ve heard of RSS but haven’t tried it out, higher-ups who rarely read journalism/new media blogs.

Institutional strictures are probably the main culprit here. Why bother being well-versed in policy if objectivity conventions forbid you from betraying your expertise in print? Why bother learning how to use new technology if the paper is (until recently) making boatloads of cash doing things the way they’ve always been done? Why explore things like RSS if nobody in the newsroom has articulated why you should do so?

Still, just as newspapers as institutions will have to change, individual journalists will have to ask themselves if they’re curious and interested enough to pro-actively face the coming shakeout. Because in three to five years, it’s likely that the only people to still have journalism jobs will be those who view journalism as more than just that job they’ve always had.

“In the case of ’30 Rock,’ the reference came in the form of an acronym — part of the title of a make-believe ‘Survivor’-like show — referring to a teenager’s crude designation of someone’s sexy mother.* In ‘The Office,’ besides the bleeping, the character’s lips were even pixilated to prevent lip reading. But it was not difficult for many viewers instantly to realize what was said**.”

* The show-within-the-show in “30 Rock” is called “MILF Island”; MILF stands for “mother I’d like to fuck.”
** In “The Office,” Jan and Michael, hosting the dinner party from hell, engage in a “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”-style face-off, culminating in an argument about having children in which it’s revealed that Michael has had a vasectomy, had it reversed, and then had another one because of Jan’s indecision. “Fine, let’s have a fucking kid,” she says sarcastically. “Do you mean it? Do you want to have a kid?” Michael asks, ready to have his second vasectomy reversal.

See, the real problem with the Times’ (and, by extension, 97 percent of daily newspapers’) prudishness is not only that it drains all the humor and realism out of the topics at hand. It’s just plain confusing, people!

Readers might think 30 Rock’s show-in-a-show was called “YMAH: Your Mom’s a Ho” or “YMSMASPFROMS: Your Mom Sent Me a Spam-Porn Friend Request on MySpace.” The Times may think it’s sheltering readers from put-cotton-in-your-ears language — but it’s really just giving them license to mentally run through all the dirty words referring to a teenager’s sexy mother. Shame on you, gutter-dwelling Times readers!!!

Furthermore, the near-total focus on these sorts of things to the exclusion of policy shows the general shallowness of newspaper political journalism, especially campaign journalism. There are many reasons for this, starting with objectivity conventions, which give reporters little reason to read white papers, policy proposals, scholarly books, etc. Whereas writers for New Republic, Atlantic, Slate et. al. are a) not bound by “objectivity” strictures and b) well-versed in policy.

Sure, there are some campaign moments that do give insight into a candidate’s policy considerations or say something genuinely noteworthy about their personality. Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Obama that perfectly dovetail with Republican attacks betray her willingness to put personal ambition ahead of the party. Obama’s devotion to progressive policy goals looks suspect when he attacks Clinton’s health care proposal via mailers that follow the same script as Republican mailers that played a major role in defeating the Clintons’ ’90s health-care reform. John McCain’s ignorance about any any number of issues portends a certain kind of detached presidency.

But for the most part, the nature of political coverage in newspapers, mainstream newsmagazines, and TV news makes the whole discussion about “media bias” in the context of the Democratic race essentially meaningless.

Anyway, since I’ll probably never get around to writing that full post, I wanted to point out two must-read pieces that do a great job of puncturing the bubble in which this political coverage takes place.

First, Ezra Klein gets at the essential silliness of the “controversy” over Obama’s recent remarks on why working-class voters might not vote for him or Democrats — remarks that, while poorly phrased, were squarely in the mainstream of Democratic discussion:

But let’s be clear: It’s not damaging because we think it foretells him doing something harmful to the country. It’s not damaging because it suggests his policy agenda is poorly conceived, or his priorities are awry. If you think of policy and politics as two circles in a Venn diagram, this is damage that only exists in the politics circle, and doesn’t even come close to the area of intersection. We reporters have to cover it, of course, because it’s Really Important, and matters more than the housing plans of all the candidates put together. But it matters in a completely self-referential way, it matters only because it matters, not because it means anything about Obama, or illuminates anything about his potential presidency. It’s a hollow scandal. …

I love the Venn diagram image. It perfectly captures why these sorts of flareups are pointless. No wonder so many people tune out politics and political news.

The second great piece is a Slate essay by Troy Patterson about the dismal state of political satire and how it reflects the shallowness of mainstream political coverage. Patterson quotes University of Iowa professor Russell L. Peterson’s new book, Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke, to describe how late-night jokes

“rarely transcend the level of pure ad hominem mockery.” They’re personality jokes and, as such, of a piece with character-based journalistic narratives that “treat newsmakers not as the subjects of newscasts but as the news’ cast.”

Patterson also nicely calls out Saturday Night Live on its satire-free political satire:

Rumors of SNL’s rebirth have been greatly exaggerated. … SNL has twice devoted sketches to the idea that debate moderators, as members of an Obama-besotted media, have given the Illinois senator an easy go of it in his one-on-one debates with Hillary Clinton. But the only jokes were in the impersonations (Amy Poehler’s schoolmarm nodding as Hillary, Fred Armisen’s catching Obama’s professor-preacher cadence) and in the hyperbole (CNN’s Soledad O’Brien so hot and bothered that she fans herself). The joke never develops beyond its premise. We all already know that the media is in the tank for Obama because we read it in the papers. SNL might have tried to turn these sketches into jokes about why this is the case — Is it about race? Celebrity? The hunger for a new narrative? — or it could have wondered about the relationship between this adoration and Obama’s oft-reported aloofness from reporters. It did not.

Likewise, Tina Fey’s editorial in support of Hillary as a guest on “Weekend Update” was not a political statement. She might have cut at the press or at Obama. What she did, instead, was to identify herself and her candidates as “bitches.” I can’t dispute Fey’s point that “bitches get stuff done,” but I will argue that the entire joke falls apart without the frisson of that word — a shock tactic that Sarah Silverman must have outgrown before her first period.

This is why the the stories saying “OMG SNL is totally sticking it to the media for sucking up to Obama!!!” were so annoying. Policy-ignorant, image-obsessed political reporters were praising a policy-ignorant, image-obsessed satirical show for calling them out on — what exactly? Focusing on one candidate’s image over the other’s? Not ignoring both candidates’ policy positions enough? Spending too much time on one candidate’s meaningless campaign minutiae? Talk about the blind (and unfunny) leading the blind (and even less funny).

It all pretty much makes my brain hurt.