Here's the background: The features editor of the brick&mortar Washington Post, Raju Narisetti, tweets some awesome commentary such as :
“We can incur all sorts of federal deficits for wars and what not ... but we have to promise not to increase it by $1 for healthcare reform? Sad.”
and
“Sen Byrd (91) in hospital after he falls from ‘standing up too quickly.” How about term limits. Or retirement age. Or commonsense to prevail.”
These comments were tweeted on a private account; meaning that unless Narisetti gave you permission to follow him, there was no way to see the tweet. That is, unless it was cut and pasted into a new tweet, email, blog post, et cetera; and attributed back to him. Is that a bad thing? No, not really. There doesn't seem to be a breach of privacy. The problem has to do with the Washington Post itself.
In Ombudsman Blog - Post Editor Ends Tweets as New Guidelines Are Issued, Andrew Alexaner writes about Narisetti's reckoning of his tweets: They were “personal” observations, he said. “But I also realize that... seeing that the managing editor of The Post is weighing in on this, it’s a clear perception problem.”
And that's in and of itself a problem: The assumption that there's no perception at all in news reporting. And that WaPo sees this as what brings value to their "brand of journalism". A brand of journalism that seems to say that nothing that has happened in last 100 years in the field of knowledge studies (philosophy, linguistics, history, sociology, politics) bears any threat to this "freedom from bias" lie.
Let me give you a recent example using the latest news about Roman Polanski as an example.
Look at the following headlines which basically report on the same bit-of-news about Polanski's arrest and impending extradition to the United States. There's from the website of a California TV station, Roman Polanski arrested on warrant for 1977 sex charge. Here's the headline for a report coming out of the usually right-wing and conservative Examiner: Director Roman Polanski arrested for 1977 rape. Yet also look at the rather fact based opinion piece wrritten for the Guardian by Melissa McEwan: Roman Polanski's life of crime. Compare that to Anne Applebaum's The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski. This last one was written for The Washington Post and still is bereft of any explanation of Ms. Applebaum's conflict of interest in the Polanski matter.
That's just a rather pedestrian example but it presents rather nicely how bias is projected by newspapers. In the case of the Polanski debacle there are those who refuse to call him a rapist even though he plea bargained his way into the statutory kind. Then there's those who either see Polanski as too good for the adjectives "fugitive", "criminal", "statutory rape" and instead opt for describing his situation as being inconvenienced by a "sex charge".
Which is why it's really amazing to read these guidelines. At this day and age, it is rather distasteful if not ludicrous for any newspaper or media outlet in this country to publish guidelines that dictate, All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens.
WaPo is not only denying they are free of bias when writing a headline about a fugitive child rapist who also is a popular Oscar wining director. What they are saying also is that, after the 100+ years of ontological work by the likes o Nieztsche, Hegel, Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Eco, Barthes and others that "perspective" and "opinion" are matters of "personal privilege".
As if perspective were something outside of humanity, something that you can turn on and off. As if "giving up perspective" were not only possible but in the case of WaPo something their employees really want in order to sell their "brand of journalism"
To which I have to say to the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington Post editorial board: Every single article or report your company publishe is a representation of your collective biases as a publication. To try to hide your biases is exactly the same as admitting them and wishing them away. Denying the individuals who work for you as journalists their ability to express and discuss their opinions and biases in a public forum is to force them to lie about the work they provide to your company. Which is to say, your desire to sell impartiality as residing outside of the reality of human perspective is a lie and it taints your image by suggesting you are a fabricator of news instead of being a true witness to history.
The full text of the guidelines was posted by Staci D. Kramer and we're reblogging with my commentary below:
more this way»
