PressEthic

It's Fox News' 10th birthday, and there are no doubt people who want to treat the network and all the personalities associated with it according to that juvenile age. But Debra Saunders argues in the San Francisco Chronicle that Fox has a place in the American media.

According to her op-ed, the term "undocumented workers" substituted for the "real" description--"illegal immigrants--"is one phrase liberal media outlets overuse. They also have a silly habit of actually believing that global warming is real.

Happily, Fox does neither of these things, and Saunders argues that having the network around offers her sanctuary, a place where a report about U.S. intelligence operations "does not read like an ACLU press release."

I would argue, in response, that there are going to be times at which reports about government activities involving human rights abuses will and should read like ACLU press releases (a comparison that, in the first place, makes more sense in her world than it does in mine). If the government is doing something agreeably wrong, it should be described--not labeled, but described--as such.

The problem is that not everyone thinks violating human rights is wrong. Torturing terror suspects, in the eyes of Dick Cheney and his supporters, for instance, is fine.

This summer I interviewed the editors of various newspapers in Egypt, and our conversations often turned the philosophical questions that help create a style of reporting. One editor, whose newspaper was connected to both a political party and a religious movement, told me that he believed it was his moral duty to report the truth the way he saw it. Giving equal audience to different "sides" of each story was a failure, he said. Reporters for his paper had not only to find out what happened but to judge the event and the people involved.

This is an extreme version of a phenomenon I believe is more common than we Americans would like to admit. In the U.S., we believe our journalists don't normally make decisions like these, but maybe they do. If Debra Saunders finds judgment in the New York Times' accounts of the abuse of prisoners, then maybe the paper's reporting is not as devoid of moral feeling as the guidelines for the make-believe quality we called objectivity dictate.

This is comforting to me. It means even the best journalists aren't automatons who absent themselves from debates about justice in order to get the perfect story. It's nice to know that, just as the people with whom I strongly disagree at Fox (how I wish I could call them evildoers) get to celebrate another year of telling things their way, so do we.