Tuesday, Ted Koppel appeared on NPR to continue his defense of “objective” journalism. His main objection to outlets like Fox and MSNBC seems to be that these news organizations are trying to make a profit:
The fact that you have these many voices on cable television, in effect, debating one another day in and day out is an inexpensive way of attracting an audience and making money, and that’s why they’re there, not because of any search for a new brighter form of journalism.
Mr. Koppel is not alone in thinking the noisy partisanship needs to stop. Indeed, here’s Senator Rockefeller just yesterday lecturing the CEO’s of the cable industry about Fox News and MSNBC:
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Put aside for the moment that the heyday of television news which Koppel lionizes was entirely corporate, one might almost say monopolistic. Let’s consider his core objection by taking a detour into another profession. If a profit motive corrupts the practice of journalism, what about the practice of law?
When the topic of lawyers arises, many Americans immediately think of Shakespeare’s line about what to do with them. It’s not without reason that the profession is unpopular. But as Winston Churchill is reported to have said “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” Similarly, the adversarial system of justice may be far from perfect, but it’s probably the best we can do. Money can corrupt justice (the OJ trial comes to mind) but that’s the exception to the rule.
Removing the loud voices and money from our political discourse may sound appealing in theory but like throwing lawyers out of the courtroom it’s a bad idea in practice. Day in and day out the adversarial system works. It helps insure that the jury (the public) sees both sides of the issue before making a critical decisions. And it’s easily a better system than one in which one individual (a news anchor) presents an ostensibly neutral summary of arguments for both sides. In practice, this never worked out too well for conservatives.
Professor Jeff Jarvis, who appeared on NPR opposite Koppel, summed up the advantages of the adversarial approach nicely:
The standard now, I think, is not objectivity. It is transparency. So the fact that I know where Keith Olbermann stands gives me the ability to judge what he says better.
Exactly. Give Keith Olbermann and Ann Coulter a chance to make their best case, then trust the public to weigh the arguments according to their own sense of the what is reasonable and what is doubtful. It’s not perfect. It may even be the worst system in the world with the sole exception of all the others.
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