A second look at Juan Williams, and then looking past him

The Juan Williams flap is more interesting than I first suggested yesterday, once the personalities and Fox squawk are toned down some.

The predictable calls for Congress to de-fund NPR were predictable. But conservative critics could gain some ammunition in their charge of liberal bias since, earlier this week, NPR accepted $1.8 million from a foundation run by liberal activist billionaire George Soros. On the other side of the partisan divide, David Weigel at Slate asks whether conservatives are letting themselves get sidetracked in the final week of campaign season:

Doesn't this remind that voter whom the Democrats are trying to spook with Christine O'Donnell attacks that the GOP he's voting for is going to wage culture war as much as it's going to try and bring back jobs?

And, of course, there's the increasing pressure on journalists to "get real" by offering opinions and reactions, rather than muck up the American reality show with mushy impartiality and faux objectivity:

The Williams firing shows that NPR, in many ways, is an example of a news organization trying to navigate new media without muddying the role of journalism in society, says Jen Reeves, an associate journalism professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

"It's confusing to the general public what journalism is anymore," says Ms. Reeves. "Our job as journalists is to question the culture and present it to the general public to think about. But instead we're constantly [playing up people's fears]."

I'm still not sure why people seek elite stand ins to sloppily represent their thoughts and opinions; and I don't see how a response to fake outrage on a show like the O'Reilly Factor offers a truthful glimpse into reality. But whatever.

There's the question of how Muslims are being used by ideologues to stand as symbols of what we should fear or what we should celebrate; there's a profit issue (people get paid more to bash on cable than to think on NPR), and then there's perhaps the most interesting question to me, one related to the opinion and spin journalism on television and online. The story was done by a reporter at NPR and it will sound sympathetic to the president to some. Here's an excerpt:

[Walt] Rowen counseled patience, sounding very much like the owner of a family business that's now celebrating its 100th year.

"Like businesses, many, many times it's a long-term process. You can't expect immediate results," he said. "You've got to look down the road and say, 'These are the policies that I need to implement now that will get me where I want to go.'

"And that's very difficult to get across in our society today. Everybody is like Velma Hart. She wants an immediate answer. She wants instant gratification. And it's not possible."

Rowen's words reminded me of Cavalier's and Amadeo's. But their philosophy isn't one that's getting a lot of airtime these days. That has left Rowen asking the question one hears from across the political spectrum: left, right and especially center.

"Why aren't people like me that have opinions like mine being asked or talked to?" he asked.

Across the country, there's no shortage of shouting this election season.  But beyond the backyard, real conversations about politics are hard to come by.

A journalist needs to set his own opinions aside to hear and report Rowen's. And it's a hell of a lot more interesting than what Juan Williams thinks when he gets on a plane.

Trust is valuable

Most people haven't thought much about what distinguishes a piece of journalism produced by, say, the Miami Herald from a piece of journalism produced by, say, World Net Daily. Neither are the subtleties dividing a Huffington Post roundup on protests in Iran and BBC story on the same topic much debated around the dinner table.

In the past, the more consistently credible reporting came bundled in a newspaper or beaming out of the radio; the less credible stuff got passed around in glossy tabloids, partisan newsletters or by word of mouth. Now all of it arrives on the same screen and often through aggregation sites that don't distinguish the well-researched, impartial story from the breezy opinion piece. Wheat and chaff are linked to side by side - and there's nothing to say any two people will agree on which is the wheat and which is the chaff.

That's not to say people don't know the difference between what Townhall does and the Los Angeles Times does - although the lines between opinion and straight reporting are getting more blurred, and not to the benefit of the reader.

Which is why the intellectual appeal to readers to pay for quality journalism, produced with high standards and under the rigors of honest editorial review, will probably never work. Instead, news organizations should come up with new ways to communicate clearly what standards and ethics they subscribe to. It will require publications to think through issues that they are too often on auto pilot about. Slogans ('Fair and Balanced') won't do the trick. And there will have to be a level of engagement with and accountability to readers that goes beyond feedback for the sake of feedback (as most online comments, reader surveys and letters to the editor are these days).

Bits of information might be passed around the Internet such that everything gets covered in the same mud, but serious readers will track information back to an original source. Original sources that have clearly laid out why their reporting is trustworthy will have a value that distinguishes them in the eyes of advertisers and potential subscribers/donors/micropayers.

Reporters escape Taliban kidnappers

David Rohde, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, and local reporter Tahir Ludin escaped their Taliban kidnappers Friday after seven months in captivity in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The New York Times and other media outlets had kept the story of the kidnappings under wraps "out of concern for the men's safety."

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Rohde, 41, had traveled to Afghanistan in early November to work on a book about the history of American involvement there when he was invited to interview a Taliban commander in Logar Province outside Kabul. Mr. Rohde, who years before had been taken prisoner while reporting in Bosnia, had instructed The Times’s bureau in Kabul about whom to notify if he did not return. He also indicated that he believed that the interview was important and that he would be all right.

His father, Harvey Rohde, said that while he regretted that his son had made the trip, he understood his motivation, “to get both sides of the story, to have his book honestly portray not just the one side but the other side as well.”

In 1996, while working for the Christian Science Monitor, Rohde was imprisoned and interrogated by Bosnian Serbs after he snuck into Serb territory to find evidence of mass graves in the Bosnian conflict.