Alien beasts…
Is The New York Times a liberal newspaper? Daniel Okrent has no trouble answering that question: yes. But what does he mean by that?
In Sunday’s column he demonstrates something of the true complexity of a newspaper and the multiple influences on the news product. One of those influences, to which Okrent would assign primary importance in the case of the NYT, is location (and what that means for its primary audience):
Today, only 50 percent of The Times’s readership resides in metropolitan New York, but the paper’s heart, mind and habits remain embedded here. You can take the paper out of the city, but without an effort to take the city and all its attendant provocations, experiments and attitudes out of the paper, readers with a different world view will find The Times an alien beast.
The influence of the NYT on the rest of journalism is often over-stated, but it is a mighty influence all the same. So Okrent’s column will be used by the unthinking and the ideologically-driven as proof positive that the news media have a liberal bias because Okrent claims journalism’s most influential product is a liberal paper. No. The news media have structural biases, and instances of ideological bias are local to a news organization (as Okrent demonstrates), or an editor, or a reporter, or an issue (as Okrent demonstrates), etc. Add to this list: local to a locality, e.g. a big city on the East Coast or a small city in a red state.
Further, Okrent points out that while the NYT may be liberal in its coverage of cultural and social issues (specifically its focus on certain aspects of issues and its headlines), that bias may not hold up in political coverage. He promises to look into this in a future column after he returns from an month-long hiatus.
For me, Okrent’s most damning assertion is about how the NYT appears to those with a different world view, i.e. a view not influenced by a large, eastern metropolitan area. Why should any newspaper, especially one thought to be the paper of record, be an alien beast to any American?
Surely, the editorial pages of a newspaper should argue for a world view that an editorial board believes best reflects the interests of the paper and/or the community. Ideological bias here is a given, and complaining about it is merely silly.
But why should the news and feature articles of any American newspaper appear like an alien beast?
I am not suggesting that it is possible to create journalism inclusive enough to appear familiar to everyone. The word for that isn’t “journalism,” it’s “pabulum.” Instead, I like the direction Okrent is going here: “Taking the New York out of The New York Times would be a really bad idea. But a determination by the editors to be mindful of the weight of its hometown’s presence would not.” I would add this: Be mindful that news situations are ambiguous and complex, and part of what journalism is supposed to do is put events in a useful, understandable context to mitigate some of the ambiguity and complexity. That’s an over-blown, academic way of saying that journalists should get and explain “both sides” of the story.
And that, my friends, is a difficult job.
