ShareThisHere is a quick test. Read the following two lead paragraphs that appeared in two different papers in January about the same set of events.. They are highly similar but with a major difference, at least in terms of objectively intended journalism. See if you can find it.
First example.
-- "The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed a stricter standard for smog-causing pollutants that would bring substantial health benefits to millions of Americans while imposing large costs on industry and local governments."
Second example:
-- "The Obama administration on Thursday proposed tougher standards for reducing smog in a move it said would save lives and reduce respiratory illness, but businesses said the change would inflict new costs on employers and consumers in a weak economy."
If, like me, you've been in the news craft for more than four decades, writing, editing and evaluating all kinds of copy, the difference jumps out at you.
The first paragraph, taken from The New York Times, flatly states the new standard will do significant health favors for millions, a highly debatable proposition. The writer of what is supposed to be a straight news story treats his opinion as if it were fact. This is what is known in the trade as editorializing.
The second paragraph, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal, does not take on the giant task of pronouncing in so many words that the justification for the standards is indisputably true. It simply tells us what the administration claims.
One day and two paragraphs written differently do not make a thoroughgoing case. But if you read the Times regularly and are sensitive to such things, you cannot help but see repeated examples of bias -- of personal politics trumping balance, of pieces that come close to outright commentary disguising themselves as news, features or straightforward analyses -- and you cannot then help but find a recent rant by a former New York Times editor as much a hoot as if it were intentional satire.
Howell Raines, who skedaddled from the Times after a scandal involving a reporter's plagiarism and made-up stories, is furious at Fox News because of its commentators' blasts at the Obama health care reform plan. In a Washington Post op-ed, he tells readers that the cable network has betrayed a professional news code that developed after World War II, that it has been tearing up "the rulebook" of "long-held norms."
Fox can take care of itself, but let's point out that the Raines attack is mainly focused on commentators whose business is to comment, that some of those commentators like the Obama plan even if most do not. The focus of these adversarial commentators is not that most Americans are against health reform generally -- Raines' indefensible argument -- but that most are in fact against a specific plan also opposed by many leading economists and reputable medical practitioners.
Now let's get to Raines. Close to the end of the 2004 presidential election campaign, the Times provided Democrat John Kerry with campaign ammunition in the form of a story about missing explosives in Iraq. The piece had all kinds of loose ends, and as much was pointed out in a column written by the ever-alert president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Clifford May, who happens to be a friend.
I was then writing and editing commentary pieces for the Scripps Howard News Service, which distributed the piece, and pretty soon received an e-mail from Raines demanding that he have a chance to reply. I agreed, but his piece was more an ad hominem diatribe than anything else. I rejected it, he complained but rewrote it and I sent the new one out, even though it did not begin to answer the points in the May argument.
My summation -- Raines was defending a politically consequential story that would never have been run by any newspaper at that time with a truly well-honed sense of fairness and balance, and the Times, as good a paper as it is in so many ways, is still up to such tricks. The Raines attack on Fox News has nothing to do with journalism. It has everything to do with pure political prejudice.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
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