"Who here is in favor of the legalization of marijuana?" That's how Time magazine Latin America Bureau Chief Tim Padgett began his talk on the future of the news media during his visit to campus September 29.
After scanning the Center 216 classroom for a show of hands, Padgett offered his own opinion:
I favor the legalization of marijuana.
I favor it for one big reason: I’m tired of writing about Mexicans being killed by the thousands because marijuana is still illegal.
People think cocaine brings in most of the $30- to $40 billion that Mexico’s drugs cartels make each year. But it’s actually marijuana. Yet marijuana, if moderately consumed, is widely considered no more harmful than our legal drug, alcohol. Which means legalizing marijuana should be for us a feasible means of putting a big dent in the drug cartels’ finances—that is, their ability to buy the assault weapons they’ve used to murder 40,000 people south of the border in the past five years. I not only believe this, but after more than two decades of seeing the massacres and beheadings and terrorized communities in Mexico, I’ve said so in my articles.
I said so in June on Time’s Global Spin blog on the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s war on drugs. I’d just returned from Durango, Mexico, where 250 corpses had been discovered in common graves. All of them were victims of drug gangs. I wrote on the one hand that the absence of rule of law in Mexico was, of course, a big cause of this nightmare. I also wrote that America has exacerbated it: I said we “need to acknowledge that we’ve helped los narcos dig the mass graves that are scarring Mexico’s landscape” because “our anti-drug policies are so narrow-mindedly focused on battling supply instead of reducing demand.”
Does revealing my opinion make me a rogue journalist? A longtime friend at the New York Times fears it does. He came to my house not long after I wrote that article and warned me that I had crossed a line: I could be a news writer or an opinion writer, but I couldn’t be both. And by trying to be both, I was betraying the journalistic standards of objectivity that Walter Lippmann and other iconic American scribes of the 20th century fought so hard to establish.
There wasn’t enough wine in my cellar to last the argument we had that night. But I’m glad we had it, because it’s one that not only journalists but American society needs to have, especially as our politics—and our media—get slowly ruined by the hyper-partisan screaming match we’re locked in today.
If you’re a media consumer, you’re probably asking these questions today: Is the firewall between news writing and op-ed writing disappearing in American journalism? Do our news articles and news analysis increasingly exude the attitude of opinion columns? Are journalists injecting more of ourselves into our stories?
Yes, on all counts. And like everything else in this world, it’s a phenomenon driven largely by market forces—and by that, I mean Fox News and MSNBC.
My friend’s big worry is that we’re succumbing to the propagandistic siren song of these networks, the kind of opinion-driven journalism that many people feel trashes the ideal of objectivity and all that gives a journalist credibility: fairness, balance, detachment. Doesn’t it damage the credibility of my news articles on the Mexican drug war, he asked, if I’m also publishing op-ed articles about the Mexican drug war—or for that matter, if my news articles or analyses on the Mexican drug war sometimes read like op-eds?
My rebuttal to him is where the 19th-century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel comes in handy. Hegel developed a system called the dialectic, in which the clash of a thesis and its antithesis yields a synthesis. I’m not a philosopher, but I am a journalist, so I know how to sound like a philosopher.
This is the new media dialectic I argued for that night:
Let’s call Fox News the thesis: journalism that fans and critics alike say is driven by conservative ideology. Let’s call MSNBC our antithesis: journalism that fans and critics alike say is driven by liberal ideology. They are the American journalism reality today, No. 1 and No. 2 in the ratings, and they are not going away.
But can we offer an alternative to them? Maybe a synthesis can come out of this; in fact, I think one is emerging. Let’s call our synthesis “objective opinion”—point-of-view journalism driven not by ideology, but by empiricism.
I’m not advocating the demise of objectivity. I’m stumping for its survival. If Fox and MSNBC dominate the media audience today—if this is what U.S. viewers and readers have decided they prefer in the 21st century—the best way we can compete with their brand of journalism is to use objectivity to beat them at their game, while at the same time breaking this country’s destructively polarized mind-set.
Why does journalistic opinion have to emanate only from either the left or the right? There are objective journalists out there already leading the way out: David Brooks, Leonard Pitts and, dare I say it, Jon Stewart. They’re serving the market that resides in that mysterious world between Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, where life isn’t an apocalyptic, zero-sum game of us-against-them.
A few months ago Time signed me up for Greta van Susteren’s show on Fox News, and she wanted to engage me on the marijuana-legalization issue. I made a point of presenting the legalization argument as the result of fact-based observation that weighed all sides of the issue and concluded that legalization is not only a way to save lives in Mexico, but also to save us money here. (Studies show we squander almost $8 billion a year in the U.S. enforcing marijuana laws.) So
I didn’t sound like a liberal; I sounded like a Tea Partier. To her credit, Van Susteren gave me a respectful hearing.
As a reader, I’m more interested in hearing opinion from objective journalists than I am in hearing it from Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Maddow. I don’t mind if they also write op-eds. I don’t even mind them hinting at the opinion in their news articles if their editors permit it. I know that the nature of their work has compelled them to do their own respectful listening, that they’ve arrived at their conclusions not through the narrow tunnel of partisan talking points but via the winding, multi-forked scenic route of interviews and investigation.
In other words, via objectivity.
Let’s examine that word. Some hold a more purist view of objectivity: A journalist presents both sides of a story, keeps his thoughts to himself and lets the reader decide. Others take a less purist view: Objectivity is a noble but impossible goal, and a journalist often looks disingenuous patting himself on the back for being objective when in fact most readers are smart enough to detect his or her outlet’s point of view in his articles.
And then there’s Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry, who says, “We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics. This is how we stay objective.”
But what do the journalism gods say? Lippmann once wrote, “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.” His highest law doesn’t say, “Be uncompromisingly objective.” It says, “Root out the truth and use it to keep the bad guys honest.” That should involve an objective process, but it doesn’t necessarily preclude a personal conclusion. Lippmann and journalists like him in the 20th century rightly advocated objectivity as strongly as they did because the American journalistic process that preceded them, from Benjamin Franklin to William Randolph Hearst, had been much too partisan, much too yellow, to serve the interests of an advanced democracy.
In 1968, after filing an objective, on-the-ground report on America’s failing military mission in Vietnam, Walter Cronkite took off his glasses, looked in the camera, and offered his empirical, non-ideological opinion: “It is increasingly clear to this reporter, that the only rational way out…will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.”
Few Americans, except perhaps Lyndon Johnson, were outraged by that. Most, I think, approved of it, were even grateful for it, because it wasn’t partisan propaganda but rather his reasonably considered—and yes, objective—judgment. Cronkite didn’t offer it in a way that said, “If you disagree with me you must be Hitler.” He was saying, “This is where I ultimately land on the issue, and I hope you take what I’ve just presented to you and come to your own independent-thinking conclusion.” Just as important, he was telling his viewers, “I’m sharing my own conclusion with you because I respect you enough to know that it would be dishonest of me at this point not to.”
Sometimes we’re panelists at for-ums, sometimes we’re moderators. The panelist is expected to voice his educated opinion; the moderator is expected to be the objective host. Does it wreck my credibility as a moderator if I’m sometimes also a panelist? Of course not. Cronkite understood that.
In fact, I think encouraging that dual role could be the antidote to our current Fox-MSNBC media culture, not a surrender to it. The reality is that the opinion genie is out of the media bottle, and I doubt we can ever put it back. And that genie was freed most of all by one powerful factor: the Internet. Facebook, Twitter: We live in a hyper-personalized, even narcissistic media age today, where opinion is the norm, not the exception. Some of that is good, some of it is really bad.
Let’s start with the bad. While I’m the first to applaud the media democratization that the Internet ignited, it also led to the idea that anyone with a basement, a bathrobe, and a computer is a journalist; and most of those basement bloggers think journalism means: Bitch about whatever pisses me off. As a result, as opposed to readers in the 20th century, too many 21st-century readers want real journalists to bloviate as gratuitously as they do on BobIsMadAsHell.com. They want journalists to help them confirm, not educate, their worldview.
But here’s the good: Because the Internet has led to such a vast array of places for readers to go for information, it has made them more discerning media shoppers. And in addition to quality reporting, writing and analysis, they usually want a bonus—that is, the journalist’s take on an issue. And that take better be convincing, or they’ll just click on Huffington Post or the other Web sites they’ve book-marked.
As much as old-timers like me grouse about what the Internet has done to journalism, writing more of the opinion-oriented pieces that Internet readers want has in many ways made me a better journalist. Supporting an opinion actually makes me work harder as a reporter. Writing opinion actually makes me more objective! If I want that opinion to be credible, I better make damn sure I’ve weighed and considered as much as I can in the process.
The media has had to adapt to this Internet reality, and that means juggling objective reportorial standards with the demand for a sharper point of view. When I wrote a journalism manual for the staff of the College newspaper The Bachelor years ago, I told the guys that point of view and opinion weren’t the same thing: Point of view was just the journalist’s judgment about the most important angle of a story. Today I concede that the Internet has blurred the line between point of view and opinion. And I think my publication, TIME magazine, has survived the Internet onslaught better than many have because we’ve given readers what our editor Rick Stengel calls “well reported point of view.”
He could also call it “non-partisan point of view,” and that’s perhaps what matters most. Journalists often debate whether the Internet phenomenon merely coincided with or helped create the disastrously polarized political environment that’s choking America today. Which-ever it is, pathetic episodes like this past summer’s debt-ceiling debacle only point up the need for the Hegelian synthesis I referred to earlier —journalism that finds merits and flaws in every camp’s agenda and renders the more credible point of view that readers want.
Sometimes that involves what I call a-pox-on-both-your-houses journalism. After the debt-ceiling disaster, I wrote a viewpoint article for TIME.com that said hemispheric roles seemed to be switched—that it was Latin America, with its robust economic growth and more centrist politics, that looked like the developed neighbor, while the U.S. looked like the banana republic: “Here we have the Third World spectacle of what was once the world’s most respected legislature reduced to the most ridiculed. Like some equatorial parliament from a Graham Greene novel, our Congress has been hijacked by Tea Party and MoveOn.org wing-nuts, whose juvenile dogmatism regarding revenue increases and entitlement reductions just brought us to the brink of the kind of debt default we once derided in countries like Uruguay.”
I don’t think Fox News would have included the Tea Party and the need for revenue increases in that critique; I don’t think MSNBC would have included MoveOn.org and the just-as-urgent need for entitlement reduc-tions. But a credible, objective analysis of our national debt crisis has to take on both liberals and conservatives. It has to involve the Hegelian synthesis.
That’s especially true when you’re writing about polarizing characters like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, or about polarizing countries like Cuba, or about polarizing institutions like the Catholic Church. I don’t feel I’m betraying objectivity by writing opinion pieces about Chavez, because my readers know I’ll give him the props he deserves—for being the first leader to steer Venezuela’s vast oil revenues to its vast legions of poor people—and I’ll give him the criticism he deserves—for his new anti-defamation laws, which criminalize speech and make him look like the dictator his critics call him.
Regarding Cuba, I make it clear that blame for that 50-year-long tragedy resides on both sides of the Florida Straits, with the Castro regime and also with our utterly failed trade embargo. If the communists in Havana and the exiles in Miami are both pissed off at me, I sleep like a baby.
As for the Catholic Church hierarchy: It likes to blame its bad press on a “secular, atheist” mainstream media, but it’s not so accustomed to criticism from journalists like me, a person of faith who holds the Catholic religion in high regard even if I sometimes hold the Vatican in low regard, especially during the clerical sex abuse crisis. I’m not going to approach the Church or religion with the kind of scornful atheist ideology that journalists like the late Christopher Hitchens trumpeted ad nauseum—but I’m not a Catholic ideologue, either, and I don’t pull punches when the Church deserves them, especially during the sexual-abuse crisis. So I feel comfortable bringing my opinion to the altar when my editors ask for it.
I will admit that what did take a while for me to get used to, and this might be my Midwestern up-bringing, was using the first-person “I” in my articles. It feels appropriate when you’re writing more postcard-style articles. It feels less so when I’m writing longer and more serious news articles, like the TIME cover on Mexico’s drug war this past summer. My editors argued that since I’d been writing about it for 21 years, it was time to offer my personal reflections. Why, they argued, would our readers want just a dry, detached report from a journalist who had stored up that much memory about one of the hemisphere’s most nagging problems?
I think they made the right call; and I think it led to me writing a more effective essay for the reader.
