That Old, Tired Balancing Act

Did the election kill objective campaign journalism?

Matt Welch from the February 2005 issue

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But that doesn't necessarily foreshadow subjective campaign coverage, or a policy of asking reporters to 'fess up their biases. "I'm not to that point yet," Robinson says. "I still believe that newspapers and the traditional media can present the news objectively, and that there's a marketplace for the objective presentation of news."

As the success of Fox News, political talk radio, partisan book publishing, and blogging has shown, there's a healthy marketplace for nonobjective presentation as well. So far, though, subjectivity has flourished only in markets that are competitive, such as New York newspapers or cable news.

With entry costs plummeting for all forms of media--more than 50 daily newspapers have been launched in the U.S. this young century--competition looks set to flourish even in currently uncompetitive markets. But as long as Objective publishing remains profitable, the two sides of the media divide are likely to dig deeper trenches. Anxious professionals on one side will continue to take the Contraption to the bank, while the barbarian army outside grows in numbers and weapons.

Jay Rosen and others are predicting that some exasperated member of the Old Guard will switch sides before 2008 and come out politically--if it's not too late to recapture their eroding audience. When and if that day comes, a generation of media critics will have to grapple with a new problem: What if the liberal media finally decide to become the liberal media?

"Some day," Rosen wrote in November, "a clever historian is going to explain how fear of being politicized (legitimate) convinced American journalists that the press could have--and should have--no politics at all. (Not legitimate.) It has been one devastating illusion."�