Ted Koppel, a Mad magazine cover who spent several centuries boring insomniac ABC viewers, returns from exile, along with Dan Rather, to lecture us all on the dangers of a free press.
Koppel objects to the expansion of the press corps to conservative media outlets. This would be a more credible objection if the media hadn't turned into a straight cheering section for Obama. There were a few exceptions in the press corps, but the outlets themselves were and are the voice of the left. And if there's no longer much difference between DailyKos and the Washington Post, why not bring in conservative media outlets?
There's no good answer to that except to put on your fedora with the press pass in it and lecture about journalism.
It sounds dangerously undemocratic to argue against broadening the scope of the White House press corps. But we are already knee-deep in an environment that permits, indeed encourages, the viral distribution of pure nonsense. It does not help that so many in the media establishment have allowed themselves to be goaded into an uninterrupted torrent of quivering outrage. Roughly half the country already questions the motives, intentions and goodwill of the other half. We are increasingly inclined to consume only the product of those news outlets that resonate with our own biases. Whatever is put forward by one side is instinctively rejected by the other.
The only appropriate response is an even greater emphasis on professional standards; factual reporting, multiple sourcing and careful editing. Our system of government depends on nothing so much as the widespread availability of credible, reliable reporting of important events. Rarely in the nation’s history has there been a greater need for objective journalism
Maybe Koppel hasn't read the Columbia Journalism Review's piece on Rethinking Objectivity. Here's a tidbit.
In 1996 the Society of Professional Journalists acknowledged this dilemma and dropped “objectivity” from its ethics code. It also changed “the truth” to simply “truth.”
The media is not in the business of objectivity. It's become wildly more biased in the past two decades to the point that its political coverage is pure editorializing with the occasional passive voice and anonymous source thrown in to echo the style of newspaperse.
The impulse in the media has been away from professional standards and toward louder advocacy. Objective journalism would be nice, but implausible.
If Koppel really wants to change that, he should be dealing with media bias instead of calling for the entrenchment of the privileges of the press. But he doesn't want to change it. Instead he's championing bias as objectivity.