PressEthic

Steve Lopez is an unabashed muckraker. Over the last six months, he has written several articles for the Los Angeles Times on LA's Skid Row, the city's homeless population and the actions of hotel employees to form a union.

Lopez, it must be said, also takes sides. It's hard not to see where his heart lies when an article on union organizers has the headline "On Their Feet For Better Living."

Lopez writes a column, so he's allowed to jut around that gray area of 'objectivity.' But what sets Lopez apart from the small and confusing list of adjectives we typically call columnists (liberal? conservative? neoconservative? neoliberal? neo-post-liberal-conservative New Democrat? Nixon Republican?) is that the issues he tends to focus on are things we typically agree about. Few, save some extreme libertarians, are going to argue that homelessness and lack of social services for the mentally ill are good things. Lopez, much like Jacob Riis before him, has his eye on reform.

Advocacy journalism is a noble goal that can easily become twisted into a knot of bias. But journalism written with reform in mind is one of the highest goals of the profession. Papers are presenting a skewed view of the world if they only show stock gains and not skid rows. And reform and liberal bias do not go hand in hand. Few remember that the progressive reforms that cleaned the slums and laid the foundation of the good government movement in the early 20th century was the work of the Republican Party.

Reporters shouldn't shy away from taking on advocacy projects because they fear charges of bias. Some issues require reasonable people to recognize that changes must be made. It's ethical for a journalist to expose a problem. It's the solutions that take objectivity.