Transparency in journalism? -- Not yet
Nothing I wrote in 2003 about making reporters explain their politics and biases at the top of each story was taken seriously, but my idea is more valid today.
Someday I'll write "Confessions of a Subjective Journalist."
I promise it will be the mostly true story of how I overcame years of ideological discrimination and rose to fame and power in the mostly liberal world of newspaper journalism. Watch for it a few years from now on C-SPAN 7.
Until then, I'd like to do something that all print and electronic journalists probably should be forced to do by their editors - explain where I'm coming from and what my political biases are.
If this sounds perfectly sensible to you, it's because you don't work in journalism.
You see, journalists like to pretend that, unlike lower human life forms, they are not helpless victims of their own emotions and subjectivity. They are neutral observers of reality.
Thanks to their professional training and experience, they believe they can cover complex, politically charged issues they care deeply about or have a vested economic interest in without letting their own opinions and passions influence the slant or balance of their writing.
This is pure bunk, as every amateur news junkie who understands the difference between CNN and Fox News knows. It is impossible for journalists to be "objective." Fair and balanced is the best humans can hope for.
This eternal struggle between objectivity and subjectivity hurts journalism. That's why -- God save us -- if I ran a daily newspaper, I'd insist that every news article end with a paragraph stating the author's known ideological prejudices and genetic idiosyncrasies.
Imagine how something like this would help readers and bring credibility to a newspaper.
Smith-Jones is a lapsed Irish Catholic from a working-class Democrat family with a masters in victimology from Ohio U. She loathes businessmen, thinks income tax rates are too low and believes everyone should be forced to use public transit, go to public schools and join a labor union.
OK, I hyperbolize. I'm not being objective or fair or balanced. Not every one of the several hundred writers and editors I've met in 30 years of small, medium and big-time newspaper journalism was a government-hugging, tax-loving, gun-hating liberal. A few were recovering socialists. Several were openly practicing Republicans.
I don't know what the politics of my route manager were when I delivered the Pittsburgh Press as a boy. But until I arrived at the Trib in the summer of 2000, I had worked with only one libertarian journalist in my career, Paul Ciotti, an excellent L.A. Times feature writer from Greensburg.
I don't know how Ciotti turned into a libertarian. But I'm sure I became one in part because I was the product of a politically mixed marriage. Mom was a Democrat. Dad was a Republican and a charter subscriber to National Review.
In our home FDR was not just liberal saint, he was also liberal devil. JFK and Nixon were equals. I admit I favored JFK in 1960, for religious reasons, but in 1964 I found Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman.
By 1976, having discovered Bastiat and Hayek and other one-name giants of human liberty, I was cruising down the road to libertarian land. It's way too late to turn back now, and I don't want to. I just wish a few of my fellow journalists had been traveling with me.
Bill Steigerwald is a lapsed Catholic who believes peaceful individuals, markets and society should be as free as possible and governments should be so small, poor and weak that no one interested in money or power would want to enter politics. He's against the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty and the War on Iraq. And he tries to stay out of bars and government buildings as much as he can.
I'm a low-wattage liberal, but I totally agree with Bill about journalists and journalism here. I'm much more comfortable knowing where someone is coming from. Of course, on many stories we don't have any kind of an ideological bent or filter, unless you classify "murder is bad" as that.