Jonathan – Page 491 – Chicago Boyz

This article details monetary contributions made by journalists to political campaigns. What a surprise: journalists have political preferences, just like the rest of us do.

The article contains a number of quotes from media representatives who fret about the supposed corruption that comes from allowing journos to make campaign donations. IMO these concerns are backwards, and reveal a confusion about the nature of bias that is more troubling than any donations would be.

The main effect of political donations in these cases is not to create bias but to reveal existing biases that might otherwise remain hidden. That’s good. The only objection to donations that I can think of is that campaigns might show favoritism to reporters in hopes of gaining donations from them. But even with a donation ban, journalists would always have the ability to provide favorable press coverage that is far more valuable to any campaign than would be the few thousand dollars that an individual journalist might contribute.

The real problem here is that many journalists act as though the appearance of being unbiased is more important than bias itself. We have a class of media people who are as partisan as anybody, but engage in silly verbal kabuki dances in which they claim not to vote or participate in elections, as if that makes them less biased than they would have been if they did participate. And then they don’t understand why the public doesn’t trust them.

Everybody is biased: it’s human nature. And the way for journalists to deal with it isn’t to remain ignorant, or shun open participation in politics, or engage in ostentatious rituals of non-partisanship. It is to admit their biases and allow their customers to make up their own minds about how to interpret information the media provide.

Political contributions are among the clearest indicators, certainly clearer than words, of contributors’ political biases. Far from forbidding them, we should encourage journalists to make such contributions as long as they disclose them. The public is smart enough to evaluate the results. And by permitting political participation by journalists we might encourage better people to become journalists, because becoming a journalist would no longer mean trying to ignore one’s own carefully developed opinions, or abandoning a high-level career in the industry one covers. Disclosure, not bureaucratic restriction of behavior, is the answer here.

(A similar argument applies to financial journalists and analysts, who should be allowed to trade stocks in industries they cover, as long as they disclose their trades.)

A Shocking Interview

January 17, 2004 by Jonathan

The establishment-left Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published this interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who is widely known for his revisionist critiques of Zionism and Israel’s founders.

The interview is remarkable, especially the second page, where Morris discusses the nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Morris’s profound new pessimism regarding the possibility of Israel’s reaching a peaceful accommodation is astonishing. Indeed, not only is he pessimistic, his current position sounds almost like last year’s leftist caricature of the Israeli Right’s position.

I forwarded the interview to a relative of mine who is sympathetic to the Israeli Left. She was shocked. In U.S. terms, it’s as if Anthony Lewis had come out in 1970 in favor of nuking North Vietnam.

I don’t know much about Morris, and this is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if his new hard attitude foretells changes in the Israeli Left paralleling those that occurred in the American Left after 9/11. In our case there has been a broad split, with many serious liberals (in the current U.S. sense of the term) aligning themselves with the Bush administration on defense issues. It will be interesting to see if Morris’s apparent shift is idiosyncratic or the harbinger of a similar ideological move in the Israeli Left. My sense is that in Israel, as in the U.S., big things are happening, and that much of what’s going on is beneath the surface — or that we are too close to events to see what will be obvious to future historians.

As I wrote, remarkable.