The Press

Oliver Stone, Idiot

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Instapundit links to an excellent interview with the great artiste. Here’s a representative sample:

[interviewer]: Did you ask him about his relationship with Juanita in Miami?

[Stone]: God, I don’t remember. There were so many women.

[interviewer]: Juanita is his sister.

[Stone]: Juanita’s his sister? … He seemed to be a very straight-shooter, very kind of shy with women.

[interviewer]: I’ve called him the movie star dictator. Did you get that sense about him?

[Stone]: Totally. I think it would be a mistake to see him as a Ceausescu. I would compare him more to Reagan and Clinton. … They were both tall and had great shoulders, and so does Fidel.

[interviewer]: For the second film, you received permission to see the dissidents [Stone]valdo Paya, Vladimiro Roca, and Elizardo Sanchez. They spoke critically of the government. Obviously, that couldn’t have happened unless permission for them to see you was granted, right? What do you make of Castro allowing that to happen?

[Stone]: I don’t think he was happy with it. I don’t think he wants to be in the same film with Paya. In his mind they are faux dissidents.

[interviewer]: He actually calls them faux dissidents? He called them the so-called dissidents?

[Stone]: Yeah, so-called, right. I was in Soviet Russia for a script in 1983, and I interviewed 20 dissidents in 12 cities. I really got an idea of dissidents that was much rougher than here. These people in Cuba were nothing compared to what I saw in Russia.

[interviewer]: Did you ever think to bring up why he doesn’t hold a presidential election?

[Stone]: I did. He said something to the effect, “We have elections.”

If you’re naive it’s easy to conclude that leftist cultural icons like Stone have some special insight. After all, they seem so confident in their views, and so many people in the press treat them deferentially. But it can take nothing more than a few pointed questions to make clear that a famous maker of politically themed movies is an ignorant fool. What’s remarkable is how seldom journalists ask such questions. But once in a while someone does, and once in a while the interviewee lets his guard down and the celebrity balloon deflates. (I give Stone credit for risking a hostile interview. Famous leftists like Barbra Streisand, who issues proclamations on her web site but otherwise shirks open debate, deserve even less respect.)

“News Is A Conversation”

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Some journalists get it. More are starting to. Here’s a thoughtful essay by one of them. (And he’s a blogger, though he fails to link to his blog.)

It is this power and influence that drives mainstream journalists to look at new media types, especially bloggers, and describe them pejoratively as the “vanity press,” “self-important,” or worse. The question, of course, is if bloggers derive their sense of importance from themselves, then from whom does the mainstream press derive theirs? You see, there exists within journalism today a belief that this power and influence of theirs is a right, a guarantee given to them by some higher authority, and therein lies the rub.

The themes of the essay are second-nature to bloggers, but it’s still nice to see the ideas spread.

Bad Thinking About Journalists’ Political Contributions

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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.)