Michael Kinsley on the Obligations of Opinion Journalists

This question of intellectual honesty runs through the core of my objections to much of today's think tank "research." Having recently read Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media," it is clear to me that the conservative movement has a much better funded and broader based network of think tanks than does the progressive movement. Also, to the extent that progressives have their own network of such think tanks, they don't seem nearly as willing to subvert or disregard the honest public discourse outlined by Kinsley. I'm certainly open to evidence to the contrary...

Chris Mooney did a nice job describing a portion of the conservative network in his May-June 2005 Mother Jones piece, wherein he described how oil$ flows from corporations to think tanks and FUD/(dis)information flows from the think tanks to the public via the MSM.

One partial solution to this problem would be for the news media to be better about disclosing the funding of their guests/ commentators, so that the readers/ viewers have a better chance of understanding potential conflicts of interest. Personally, I would like to see reporters/hosts asking their guests about those conflicts more openly and directly. This approach may be uncomfortable for some of their guests... yet, I see no problem with that!

Being a newspaper reporter myself, when I hear a journalist in the alternative media discuss dropping objectivity, I get a little skeptical.

Objectivity certainly can be taken to an extreme, resulting in the "he said/she said" kind of reporting that helps no one. And that's been the lazy way many newspapers have done it. To me, all it means is stepping back from an issue, acknowledging your biases, keeping an open mind and reporting the best facts available.

The problem I have with many alternative media -- generally alternative weeklies and online news magazine -- is reporters use the argument against objectivity simply as an excuse for passing off opinion pieces as journalism. Too often the articles oversimplify an issue, presenting only the facts that back up the reporter's stance and assigning motives to the individuals or groups against that stance that may not exist. Of course, readers with strong ideological views love this kind of "reporting" because, when you get down to it, they don't want to be educated -- they just want their cherished beliefs vindicated. That's why too many alternative news outlets fall under the label "liberal" and "conservative," never mind the world is far more complicated than that.

Of course that's not true in every case. Some journalists excel in alternative journalism. And I know that is what Kinsley is pointing out: Opinion journalism doesn't free you from the ethical obligations of getting your facts right or keeping an open mind. But I would hate to see a world where journalists give up all objectivity under the lazy excuse that it is just not possible.

I'll second that Amen - not just to journalism, but to critical thinking in general. Well said.

Of all the blogs I would expect to see endorse Mr. Kinsley's opinion, I would expect this one to be among the last. A scientist can want to cure cancer without tainting his or her lab findings. To do otherwise, is to defeat the intent. But, a pundit cannot want to improve the public discourse without letting the facts inform his or her opinion. To do otherwise is simply to overthrow rationalism and progressivism in the most radical sense.

Kinsley also writes: "But if opinion journalism became the norm, rather than a somewhat discredited exception to the norm, it might not be so often reduced to a parody of itself. Unless, of course, I am completely wrong."

What rock is he living under? Opinion journalism is the norm. (As far as the mainstream press is concerned, the spectrum of opinion runs mostly from the right to what Josh Marshall has aptly named the "supercilious center"--a group that now passes for the journalistic "left" and which I have always believed to include Mr. Kinsley.) Objectivity is the discredited exception that has been reduced to a parody of itself. The Washington Times, FOXNews, WSJ, and Elisabeth Bumiller are treated as full equals to any of their counterparts. Brit Hume, who blatantly reports unsubstantiated opinions every night, is as widely watched as ever while Dan Rather has been banished for sheepishly trying to tie the truth about Bush's military record to a document that was unnecessary to begin with (yet turned out to be false) because he was too afraid to say what the record had plainly showed since he and his peers had first ignored it back in 1999-2000. (Maybe Ms. Couric will tackle the tough issues.) Fortunately, Mr. Kinsley's self-doubt is justified. He is completely wrong.

Some opinion journalists -- and even some self-styled "objective" journalists -- are clearly not intellectually honest by Kinsely's standard.

Instead of admitting they were wrong to begin with when confronted with evidence that contradicts their position, they try to "finagle their way out".

A perfect example of this is the way that the global warming issue has been handled by some "journalists" (I use the term loosely):

-- First they denied the problem existed (dismissing it as a "myth" and thereby denigrating the idea and those who had proposed it -- a time-honored propaganda technique).

--Then, when the growing evidence made it clear that they could no longer deny the existence of the problem without simply looking foolish, they "transitioned" almost seamlessly (watch carefully, the hand is quicker than the eye) into their second position: "Global warming is real, but it is most likely the result of natural phenomena (eg, increased solar output) -- so let's just enjoy the balmy winters, shall we?"

This is where many of the intellectually dishonest still stand today, though I suspect we are quickly approaching another watershed...

..and as the evidence indicating a significant human-induced component of the warming grows to the point where IT too is no longer reasonably denied, one might fully expect the global warming contrarians to transition YET AGAIN into their FINAL position: "prevention is no longer possible and would be far too costly -- so dollars would be better spent on dealing with the inevitable outcome".

I eagerly await the final transition. I expect we will not have long to wait. Who knows, perhaps unbeknownst to me, some have ALREADY made the leap.

"prevention is no longer possible and would be far too costly -- so dollars would be better spent on dealing with the inevitable outcome"

If that becomes their position, and it may well turn out that way, we had better start raising the issue of the cost of likely outcomes:

⢠loss of coastal cities and island nations
⢠upsurge in tropical diseases
⢠disruption of agriculture
⢠mass migrations of climate refugees
⢠regional wars that may ignite a world war

If we raise such issues now, we will be called alarmists. But if the contrarians say we should decide to live with the inevitable consequences, they will be opening the door for us to spell out just what those consequences are likely to be.

Simply put, it won't be good for most businesses, not to mention "children and other living things," to quote an old anti-war slogan.

Do you really think they are so misguided and unbending?

Here is one of the best working axioms ever suggested by Garrett Hardin. "If your mind is completely open, it is empty." Open to what? It is what we hold in our brains that moulds our conceptions and defines us.
For example; the U. S. patent office dose not accept applications for free energy inventions. Yes, they are very biased and prejudiced on this singular point. As far as anybody knows such devices are IMPOSSIBLE, and it is the definition of intelligence and conservation of resources to accept such an impossibility theorem.
E. F. Schumacher, surely a decent fellow, ended up preaching breatharianism (living without food or water, living on spirituality) in his last book, Guide for the Perplexed. An ex-astronaut with very impressive academic credentials (I went to high school with him one-half century ago) is cheerfully milking the environmental community by preaching all kinds of pie-in-the-sky nonsense about zero point and/or free energy solutions to the energy crisis. He was formerly a devotee of Indian con-man Sai Baba but has since backed off on his holiness's ability to create (manifest in mystic doubletalk) matter.

Fred Bortz wrote: "Do you really think they are so misguided and unbending?"

I'd have to answer "yes, some clearly are."

I am not referring here to the average American concerned with the health of the environment -- not only for the welfare of their children but for their bottom line of their small business.

Clearly, the average concerned American is NOT making the decisions on this issue.

These are being made primarily by people whose primary goal is to turn the maximum company profit each year -- energy industry executives, for example. realistically speaking, they have little if any concern for what happens 50 or 100 years out.

The energy industry (coal, oil, gas companies and companies with power plants) along with the automotive companies are perhaps the biggest "shakers" (and "bakers") of the policy toward global warming in this country.

They have an extremely large monetary incentive to torpedo any and all attempts to place limits on green-house gas emissions.

And to date, many have done a very good job of doing just that. Witness all the money that companies like Exxon-Mobil have contributed to "think tanks" publishing contrarianism on global warming over the past few years (to scuttle Kyoto, first and foremost). It amounts to millions of dollars, -- which is really just a drop in the bucket for them, of course.

Some corporate heads are still in the sand, but not all. According to this article, some energy companies are coming forward and asking for regulation:

http://grist.org/news/muck/2006/04/06/griscom-little/index.html

"'GE supports congressional action now,' David Slump, the top marketing executive in GE's energy division, said at the hearing."

Even if this is just a PR maneuver, you get a sense that we may be at a different point with climate policy. We've come a ways from the glory days of the Global Climate Coalition. Maybe Will and Novak didn't get the memo. Or maybe they did, but they got other memos from Exxon-Mobil who don't want a level playing field, and still want everyone to emit all they want with no incentives for responsible behavior...

The phenomenal success of the cult film, "What the bleep do we know?" tells me a great deal about the intellectual state of supernation. It is just as alarmingly nonsensical as any variation of the coming Christian rapture. Interestingly enough, the new age mystagogues of wealthy channeler J. Z. Knight have come up with a sequel - "Down the Rabbit hole."