Can Journalism Ever Be Objective?

My good friend Kate Robinson had this to say about Bill Moyers (about which, more here) as well as about Edward Lee Pitts' set-up of Rummy Rumsfeld. In her piece, Kate asks a very good question: How can you have "fair and balanced" reporting, so long as human beings are doing the reporting?

To understand what she's talking about, you have to consider the origins of journalism. Can any of you out there name for me the very first newspaper? Before you scratch your heads raw, here's the answer: The Roman Senate Journal, edited and published by Gaius Julius Caesar, consul of the Roman Senate, Pontifex Maximus, etc., etc. (to quote Rex Harrison in Cleopatra). How that publication came to be speaks volumes about what the purpose of journalism really is.

The Senate of Rome was not the first-ever legislative assembly--that honor belongs to the Assembly of the Five Hundred in ancient Athens. (Nor was the Senate a representative assembly; you got into the Senate if you made a million sesterces or more per year from farm income only, or by virtue of being elected to certain offices or winning certain military awards.) But like any large deliberative body, it had its political crosscurrents that were endemic to the institution--something we see in the United States Senate today and in every legislative body anywhere in the world. Caesar got into the Senate after earning a Civic Crown in battle--and it's also relevant to observe that Caesar won that Crown after a superior officer set him and his unit up to be slaughtered, and Caesar never--but never--forgot that. Knowing that the so-called Good Men of Rome resented him, Caesar always sought favor with the commonfolk of Rome. He grew up with these people--his mother owned an apartment building in what would today be the slums, and she was not an absentee landlady!--and he knew their lingo in more ways than one. Knowing how to work such crowds got him elected to all the senior magistracies that he sought.

So when he finally got elected consul, he knew that he'd have to bully the Senate into enacting any of his measures into law, or at least staying out of his way. To manage that, he needed the suppport of the People's and Plebeian Assemblies, which were representative bodies. But they could never know the real issues unless they had a regular source of information on what happened in the Senate every day.

Now as it happened, any man had a right to listen at the doorway of the Senate, so long as the Senate was meeting with its doors open, and take down and even repeat what was said. But Caesar was too smart to rely on people to crowd at the doors every day. So his first measure was to order that someone take minutes of the Senate's open-door meetings and to publish those minutes--titled Acta Diurna Senatus Romani, literally "The Daily Doings of the Roman Senate", prominently in the Roman Forum the next day. Caesar's gambit worked--and the Power of the Press has never failed to command respect since then.

And that's Kate Robinson's point: whoever edits and publishes any news organ, dictates the tone it will take in the gathering of the news and in decisions on what news it will cover and how. If you want an illustration, rent the Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane--or look up the real history of William Randolph Hearst and of the perhaps questionable coverage of the events that led to the Spanish-American War. The only things you can do are these:

1. Direct that the government will never directly interfere with a private individual who wants to cover the news.
2. Don't have the government covering its own news.

In a very real sense, however, the government has been directly violative of the second item even by having a Public Broadcasting Service--and as for the first item, I would only maintain that "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance," and that anything that touches questions of ownership, permitted ways to reach a subscriber base, or anything else is something to look at very carefully and even with a jaundiced eye.

Because in the end, the only thing that will provide a true balance in the coverage of the news is competition in the gathering of that news (and not just in multiple ownership but in multiple mind-sets), coupled with better training of our children to reckon properly with the biases of various editors and publishers and sort out fact from fancy in everything they read. We have that competition now, whereas we didn't before. And if I had any concrete suggestion for legislative reform, it would be this: Let us abolish that unofficial, extra-legal, and, I maintain, unconstitutional Department of Information that is called the Public Broadcasting Service. Presidents of the United States should not be appointing Secretaries of Information--but during the Clinton years, that's exactly where we were headed. Now we must destroy even the bare possibility.