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EDITORIAL: Journalists should be responsible

September 05, 2008

What an amazing night in politics was Wednesday. Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska gave a rousing, motivating speech to delegates at the Republican National Convention. We will surely be seeing much more of her beyond this campaign, beyond this election, win or lose. This criticism is not for her, however, but for a few misguided members of the media, a few of our institutions that are not acting responsibly in their coverage of politics.

It's fair to first point out that it is the media's responsibility to ask tough questions, to help the electorate, the readers and listeners, to measure the qualifications of any candidate, despite what a campaign might put forth as spin. It's the media's responsibility to pull back the curtain and offer up a "yeah, but ," when there is one, so that something close to the complete truth emerges.

Many of those questions were appropriately asked of and about Gov. Palin. But we all know about some of the questions and innuendo that were not appropriate. We know because leaders of both parties, not just Palin's, rebuked them, saying that family, especially a child, is off limits.

Well, nothing relevant is off limits, but relevance has become too easy to define as such. Very personal information about a candidate can be extremely relevant, but it is not so just because it is personal.

When did this kind of coverage begin? How did we get to this point in political discourse? There were two events, probably, that catapulted us so deeply into the "politics of personal destruction."

One was the Monica Lewinsky scandal during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Clinton's scandal was full of relevancy. It happened on the people's time and on the people's property. But his supporters, and many in the media, began to see it more and more as license to delve into the personal lives of anyone in public office or interested in one.

Internet speeded up conversations

The other event was the explosion of the conversation on the Internet, the competition that has resulted and the free-wheeling, unedited discourse that prevails.

Information moves faster than it can be verified and studied, requiring that important process to take place as the information is released, rather than before. It's a dangerous outcome of the information revolution that results in serious questions by consumers about what is the truth, and when and by whom it was vetted.

And that has polarized us even more because we tend to gravitate more to information we want, not necessarily need, and a market is created for clearly biased "coverage."

Many point to FOX News as the prime example - and that criticism is often justified - but anyone watching the conventions on MSNBC would note that Keith Olberman was eager to refer, loudly, to Hillary Clinton's speech as "a grand slam, out of the park, over the street, over the buildings across the street," but for Sarah Palin's clearly astounding performance could only muster, after a lingering silence, that she was "condescending" toward Obama and then wondered aloud how that might play outside the convention arena.

One commentator on FOX was led to surmise that journalism is dead.

We don't think that is true. You will demand good, responsible journalism, good information, in a free society, and in a free, capitalistic society, supply follows demand.

Don't wait too long.

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