Sanctimonious puffery

Times editor Bill Keller has a letter to the editor in Opinion Journal defending deep leak stories like Dana Priest's "secret prisons" prize winner. Hugh Hewitt addresses his main argument here. I'm more interested in the flashy accessories that he uses to dress up his rhetoric.

Keller wants us to know that there is a big difference between "the curiosity-driven world of reporters and editors from the ideology-driven world of editorial writers and columnists."

That sounds nice, but it provides a false picture of what most reporters do and how they think.

The first function of a reporter is to generate content to fill the spaces between advertisements. That's not all they do, but it is the first thing they do. News reporters are no different than editorial writers. Moreover, reporters at the Times fill the same role for that paper as the writers at the National Enquirer do for the rag that pays them. They all write against the deadline.

Most reporters cover a specific beat. They get paid to be bored. Boredom, not curiosity is the hallmark of their workday. They sit through interminable hearings, listen to the same stump speeches over and over, spar with the same spokespeople at the same regular briefings. Their insouciant cynicism is not the result of seeing too much of the world. It is the predictable consequence of seeing the same tiny slice of life everyday for too long with the same people.

Boredom, deadline pressure, the need to be on the job all the time, working alongside other bored, pressured people-all of these work against curiosity and learning.

Tired bored people will find ways to amuse themselves and bring a little zest to their life. No one can blame them for that, but journalists take the games they invent seriously.

I often wonder if modern journalism has lost its ability to keep the game separate from the reality reporters cover. The profession plays by a set of rules which add excitement and permit score-keeping. The former is superficial and the latter is spurious, BUT THE PRACTITIONERS NO LONGER RECOGNIZE THIS. They think such things matter in the larger scheme of things.

Keller then offers us this:

The role of journalism on our side of the news/opinion divide, at least as we aspire to perform it, is not to be advocates for or against any president or any party or any cause. It is not to tell our readers what we think or what they should think, but to provide information and analysis that enables them to make up their own minds.

I just can't square this with Jack Shafer's article in Slate on Rathergate and investigative journalism.

I don't know that I've met more than four or five investigative journalists in my life who didn't wear their political biases on their flapping tongues. Almost to a one, they're suspicious (paranoid?) about corporate power, dubious about the intentions of governments, and convinced that at this very moment a secret meeting is being held somewhere in which a hateful conspiracy against the masses is being hatched. I won't provoke the investigative-journalist union by alleging that most of its members are Democrats or lefties, but aside from a few right-wing reporters sucking conservative teats inside the government, how many Republican investigative aces can you name?

Liberal favorite Cass Sunstein also explained why mono-ideological environments (like newsooms) lead to distorted thinking

Finally, Keller's adoption of the Fox News slogan-"We report, readers decide"-is hard to square with David Warsh's insight that newspapers compete in "explanation space". Warsh defines that as "the lofty region where short-term causal explanations of events are forged."

Warsh also writes that " by their very nature, newspapers also exist to communicate a sense of proportion. A good deal of their impact derives from the way they choose to play a story."

Keller kind of overlooked that point.