21st century journalism standards not for me

By Tony Stein

The hassle over the suspension of an MSNBC personality for making a political donation has been hashed out on TV, radio and the Internet for the past two weeks. I haven't liked a lot of what I've heard.

The gist of the discussion was that there is an almost unstoppable trend away from the notion that a reporter reports from a neutral standpoint. He or she puts aside personal feelings and carefully constructs a story that is accurate and free of any personal bias.

That's the way reporters of my generation were trained. That's the code I have strived to follow for all of my 59-year career as a newspaperman.

Sometimes, it's painfully hard. Sometimes, you get to know and like a public figure, and suddenly that person does something that draws sharp public criticism. If you are assigned to write the story, you have to put aside that friendship and work in a sort of emotional vacuum. You choose words. Words are not neutral. They have connotations. Simple example: If you write that a person "noted" something, it establishes that the person spoke a fact, so you write only that he or she "said" something.

Often, despite a reporter's best effort at neutrality, readers will say that the story was biased. That's because every reader brings personal prejudices to the story. The reader interprets the choices of words and information according to his or her personal beliefs. Truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Many years ago, a political reporter I worked with came back to the office during an election campaign and had a bemused smile on his face. He said that the Republicans accused him of favoring the Democrats, and the Democrats accused him of favoring the Republicans. "I figured I was right down the middle," he told me.

Opinions belong on the editorial page. I hear people talk about "biased" editorials. That's a large misunderstanding. Editorials are supposed to argue for one side of an issue or the other. But the news pages should be as pure of opinion as humanly possible.

For me, that means I have never contributed to or worked for a political candidate. I write a column for the Chesapeake section, but it is not a political column, nor will it ever be. I have a painful memory of one of my colleagues wearing a Kennedy button in 1960. He should not have. It weakened his believability and the believability of his newspaper.

All of this makes me deeply suspicious of the Internet, with its endless supply of bloggers. What is their training? What is their standard of fairness and accuracy?

One of the comments in that discussion of journalistic standards I watched was that there is a "21st century journalism," and old standards are fading away. At 81, I'm pretty much a 20th century guy, and I hope my profession of journalism lags behind right with me.

Tony Stein is a retired Virginian-Pilot staff writer. He writes a weekly column for the Clipper, The Pilot's community section in Chesapeake, and lives in Chesapeake. E-mail him at steinstuff@aol.com.