PressEthic

Brooke Gladstone of NPR's On the Media is an excellent reporter. But she's also human and they make mistakes. Gladstone made two: she broke her voting machine but, even worse, she let it slip on the air that she voted for Hillary Clinton.

On the Nov. 11 episode of On the Media, Gladstone recounted her story and reviewed the question of how far journalists should go in expressing their political beliefs. Some newsrooms don't allow their reporters to reveal their political leanings or register with a party. Should reporters be allowed to vote at all?

It's ridiculous for the media to pretend that journalists don't have political beliefs. But Gladstone says:

The argument against laying your cards, assuming you have any, on the table is two-fold. One says, that if a reporter states their conflict of interest right and left editors would have to bar them from covering certain stories because the public wouldn't trust them to be fair, even if they were; it's about appearances. We'll return to that one. But there's a second, more intriguing, argument, the one that says that taking a political action makes your views stronger.

With the latter argument, some editors say just stating your political beliefs "out loud" will change you internally, and you'll persuade yourself as well as others, that your view is right. If you keep it to yourself, you'll be more open to other views. After all, aren't journalists supposed to be observers, not participants in the political arena?

A seemingly useless argument is to keep up the appearance of objectivity. Gladstone says journalists can try too hard to keep up the appearance of objectivity, which results in crappy reporting (the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the War on Terrorism are good examples).

Gladstone:

A reporter should be able to call a lie a lie. But the conventions of American journalism, so attentive to appearance, make it tough to say that. In the news pages, official statements come first. Challenges appear after the jump. News analysis arrives in a box, deep inside the paper.

Gladstone says it's important to tell the facts before the jump, regardless of the subject, or the writer, being Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal. "And we don't need to know who you're voting for."

Journalists have intelligent opinions about who should be in political office. I think they should be able to register for political parties and pull the lever on election day. Why would a group that trumpets freedom of speech want to bar that right to their own kin?