All Blog Posts from Public Eye

You gotta like a guy like the Los Angeles Times’ Tim Rutten. Here’s a guy who one day quotes Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” in a book review and then turns on a dime and pens an insightful piece on the newspaper industry.

The latter is definitely worth a read – especially for the dead-on description of news snobs -- and one passage in particular caught my attention:

So how do American newspapers manage this passage while holding on to their "souls" -- that sense that they are, uniquely, businesses worthy of constitutional protection because their bottom line reckons service to the common good alongside profit and loss?

One way is to maintain the serious news media's postwar tradition of nonpartisan journalism, leaving advocacy to the editorial pages. As they give themselves over to more analysis and commentary, newspapers will have to be more vigilant about being genuinely honest brokers of ideas, opening their news columns to a far broader spectrum of serious opinions and perspectives -- liberal to conservative -- than even the best of them do now. Politicization is the enemy rather than the logical consequence of that process. Newspapers can distinguish themselves from the current undifferentiated cacophony of substantial and frivolous opinion on the Internet -- and best serve their readers -- by insisting that their analysis and commentary conform to the discernible facts. In a society that seems more deeply and reflexively divided along partisan lines, that would be more than a service.

So Rutten is suggesting that journalists use their heightened knowledge of their subject matter to add value to their work. (Sound familiar?)

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Nearly a month ago, I wrote in this space about the Associated Press’ Ron Fournier writing a Jerry McGuire-esque “Mission Statement” to the DC bureau, encouraging reporters to write “Accountability Journalism” stories with a purpose. In his note to the AP folks, Fournier wrote:

We can be provocative without being partisan. We can be truth-tellers without being editorial writers. We can and we must not only tell people what happened in politics today, but why it happened; what it might mean for our readers and their families; and what it might reveal about the people who presume to be our leaders. Sometimes, they’re just plain wrong.

One of the four pillars of this approach was journalistic follow-up. So in that spirit, I thought I’d follow-up on that piece and highlight an example of his concept at work.

The front page story in yesterday’s Washington Post, entitled “Administration Shaving Yardstick for Iraq Gains,” was a solid bit of reporting on how the goals being targeted by the White House don’t necessarily jibe with those originally envisioned at the beginning of the ‘surge’ we’re in the middle of:

In a preview of the assessment it must deliver to Congress in September, the administration will report that Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province are turning against the group al-Qaeda in Iraq in growing numbers; that sectarian killings were down in June; and that Iraqi political leaders managed last month to agree on a unified response to the bombing of a major religious shrine, officials said.

Those achievements are markedly different from the benchmarks Bush set when he announced his decision to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq. More troops, Bush said, would enable the Iraqis to proceed with provincial elections this year and pass a raft of power-sharing legislation. In addition, he said, the government of President Nouri al-Maliki planned to "take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November."

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I suggested in this space on Friday that a new technological innovation could increase the ‘watchability’ of presidential debates – Pop Up Politics. The concept, admittedly ripped from VH-1’s “Pop Up Video,” would supply a little bubble next to a candidate when their rhetoric stretched or mischaracterized their previous stances on an issue or vote. (The other innovation I suggested – cutting off the debate right in the middle, with an old Journey song blasting – doesn’t seem to go over so well.)

The way I figured it, Pop Up Politics would be a very useful gimmick to provide real-time fact checking – even if it was seemed susceptible to bias claims from one side or the other.
So it was very good to see no less than the Associated Press coming forward to stress the need for a similar concept: “Accountability Journalism” in Campaign 2008. (Not quite “Pop Up,” but hey, it’s the staid AP.)

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