"The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy."
- Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News
Sacred? Priestly? To make such allusions to a higher power, or at least a higher calling, asks journalists to live up to an unachievable standard, and more importantly asks the public to believe that they can. The analogy of the editor to priest implies someone above self-interest and other earthly sins, someone we can trust implicitly, an infallible guide as we hope our preachers and ministers to be. However, if a reporter were truly unbiased, he wouldn't be reporting anything, since to cover a story is to comment on it, even if it is just to say "This story is newsworthy, consider it."
On closer reading, though, Lippmann never mentions "unbiased" or "balanced." He limits his editor-priest to selecting and ordering. In doing so, however, he is giving reporters and editors the awesome power to decide what news reaches us, the public. If they are the priests, then we are the parishioners, and how many of us would doubt the word of a man of the cloth? (Well, quite a few of us perhaps, but we'd probably be very bad parishioners.)
The main inconsistency with this view, however, is that it implies a unidirectional relationship between reader and reporter, with the newsroom delivering the information from on high to a receptive congregation. At the recent environmentalism symposium at CU, I attended the panel "Communicating Climate Change: Is Anybody Listening?" Panel member Peter Dykstra of CNN addressed the challenge of balancing significant news against the popular public demands of viewers who wanted more coverage of Anna Nicole Smith than of the growing climate crisis. Obviously the media corporations have similar customer relation concerns as any other large business. Editors guide, but are also guided by, public sentiment and mood.
While it is comforting to imagine a reporter leading us safely and knowledgeably through the wilderness of information, a better analogy might be something a bit more earthly, the shepherd, perhaps, guiding his flock in the main but also following where they choose to graze.
