This Just In

In The Lost Art of Argument, Christopher Lasch charges that journalism actually lost its ability to effectively inform the public when it abandoned the partisan style. This style actually provoked public debate rather than silencing it, he argues; journalists assigned value to the facts, and this valuation stimulated a dialogue that resulted in an informed public. Current “objective” journalism does not provoke debate, rather it stifles it because there is nothing to discuss. In modern journalism, articles can only be argued with on the basis of their factual validity; our society is no longer accustomed to debating meaning in any useful fashion.
To spot-check this argument, I took a look at today’s London Times Online. The headline for the top story of the Global Edition was:

West goes cap in hand to the East for credit crunch help

The article contains two parts: there is a video clip from Sky One describing a report from British financial institutions. The report is said to be cautiously optimistic, in that the markets have stabilized. However, the clip also introduces an expert who says that although the tumult of the last few months may be over, there is still going to be rising unemployment and that the economy has not yet arrived at the real bottom. In other words, the economy may not continue to plunge, but it is not likely to recover or improve. This seems to be serving as an item of in-depth background, rather than the focus of the article. However, it presented a more interesting news story than the headline article!

The print component elaborates on the headline. Essentially, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank need more money so that they can continue to lend money to countries in financial difficulty- the economic crisis has hit so many nations so hard that these two banking institutions risk having all their funds tied up. Therefore, the traditionally Western-backed IMF and World Bank are going to appeal to relatively unaffected Eastern countries such as China, Japan, and the Gulf States. These nations are going to insist on having more input on the operation of the IMF and World Bank, and thus greater influence over the banks’ clients.

This article demonstrated some things about the approach of most print journalism. The aticle was very straightforward, simply repeating quotes from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and relating facts from the public record. Although it is clear to someone who has followed international affairs for some time that this is a major development, and a further sign of how much trouble world finance is in, it is not really treated like a big deal in the article. There is no real value assigned to the facts. Though the article hints at a “high price” for Eastern aid, it offers no indications of what that price might be (even references to past negotiations would have been helpful). In other words, there is no slant, except for the slant towards the impersonal and the remote.
The video clip, on the other hand, actually offers something like effective reporting. It describes the primary thrust of the new financial report, speaks to an official from Lloyd’s of London who agrees that we’ve turned the corner on the economy. Then Sky One goes to an analyst who disagrees, and provides (in my opinion) a well-reasoned argument as to why we haven’t seen the end of the downturn. In other words, even though the piece does not seem to have a definite bias, it does at least present some debate- it offers two competing interpretations, two contexts for the facts, and leaves the decision to the audience.

This actually clarifies my reaction to Lasch: he is definitely right about the poor state of public discourse, which can be traced to an anemic mass media. However, disowning objectivity entirely is not the answer; rather, we would do better to emulate the old “Fairness Doctrine,” where the facts are presented as well as equal time to the different sides of the debate over what the facts mean.