麻豆社

My network, right or left

• Paul Mason
• 4 Apr 06, 01:58 PM

A brilliant article today on , by ex-CNN journalist Michael Kinsley. Noting the transformation of US telly journo Lou Dobbs from someone who does mild interviews with business chief execs into the American equivalent of Richard Littlejohn, Kinsley part laments and part explains why opinion journalism is taking over cable TV in the USA...

Kinsey muses...

"Would it be the end of the world if American newspapers abandoned the cult of objectivity? In intellectual fields other than journalism, the notion of an objective reality that words are capable of describing has been going ever more deeply out of fashion for decades. Maybe it doesn't matter what linguists think. But even within journalism, there are reassuring models of what a post-objective press might look like."

My two-pennor'th, as far as my contract allows me to have one (!) is this. I truly believe there is an objective reality out there that words can describe. However journalism's job is to be the first draft of history and you therefore cannot approach a story without some kind of "thesis", foreknowledge or angle. You have to test that angle, and the first truism on the list for me is that the story you find is always more interesting, and truer, than the one you thought you were going to find.

However - the creation of big siloes in journalism has not been good for the practice of it. In the newspapers you get reporters and then you get "opinion formers" with picture bylines. Long-form reporting in all genres is on the decline, so the ability to simply get alongside people and dig away at the microcosm is limited.

My two heroes are George Orwell and Vasily Grossman. They refused to specialise - and both saw journalism as a continuum from straight reporting, analysis, observation, opinion ... right through to novels and poetry. They were both driven by their opinions - and both had their viewpoints profoundly changed by stories they did not expect to find. Orwell reported a highly unpopular truth about the anti-fascist side in the Spanish Civil War ("the lie that slew you is buried under a deeper lie"). And Grossman discovered, and tried to make public, a) the wretched and murderous behaviour of Communist officials, generals and Red Army soliders b) the vast and horrific scale of the Holocaust (which, again, his bosses tried to diminish). There is an excellent collection of Grossman's work out, from Anthony Beevor (I will not post a link because the publisher is also my publisher, so find it yourself). Some of Orwell's journalism is available on .

I would contend that both Orwell and Grossman got closer to the "story" than any of their contemporaries despite the fact that they were not even embeds, they were combatants!

So maybe the problem is not necessarily journalism but TV: even in America, where the statutory restrictions are slimmer, TV news has up to now played to the principle of fairness and balance - it is Fox News's slogan. In the UK where we are all effectively "public service" journalists in TV, the big challenge is to avoid "objectivity" transforming itself into "do not give a monkey's". Because if there is one thing that eats away at authenticity it is that false two-way shrug "Labour says this, but the Tories say this" that is supposed to guard you against bias. In the first place it never does. On top of that, once the viewer stops believing you that is the end of the journalism.

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