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[bryant]

Hugh Hewitt has a fairly revealing piece this morning calling for reporters to answer a short questionnaire.

What questions would I like answered? Very simple ones: For whom did the reporter vote for president in the past five elections?  Do they attend church regularly and if so, in which denomination?  Do they believe that the late-term abortion procedure known as partial birth abortion should be legal? Do they believe same sex marriage ought to be legal?  Did they support the invasion of Iraq?  Do they support drilling in ANWR?

If I know the answers to those ten questions, I can quickly decide what degree of trust with which to approach a reporter's reporting.  Even "low trust" reporters can earn trust, of course, but degrees of suspicion are a fact of life.  Only MSM pretends otherwise, and bloggers have exposed that pretension as the fiction it really is, even if most of MSM want to continue the charade.

Got that? His degree of trust in any given reporter depends on whether or not they believe same sex marriage should be legal. It depends on whether or not they support drilling for oil in ANWR. It depends on not only their church-going habits, but what denomination they belong to. Unitarian Universalists need not apply?

He sets up for the list of questions by noting that everyone brings baggage to the reporting of the news, and thus argues that if you're not willing to reveal that baggage, you're untrustworthy. But then he makes the jump to asserting that it's not just the revelation of the baggage that matters, it's what the baggage is. It's not "if those ten questions are answered," it's "the answers to those ten questions." This is no more and no less than an ideological-based test for reporters, and it's disgusting.

Comments

[eddyfate.livejournal.com]

Yes, reporters have baggage - they're human. Maybe I'm wrong, though, but I thought the idea was to achieve more objectivity in journalistic reporting, not less. I don't give a shit if the reporter is Christian, Catholic, Jewish, or a baby-eating Satanist - I just want news presented to me in an unbiased fashion.

Fucktard.

[gentlyepigrams]

On some level I can't get too excited about this. The information age is returning us to an earlier era, when newspapers (and by modern extension, radio/TV/web sites/blogs) were all actively partisan. The only difference now is that we can choose which biased source we want to use to inform ourselves.

[bryant]

Sure. But part of choosing sources is pointing out bias when it exists, and since Hewitt pretends that he himself is unbiased...

[gentlyepigrams]

That's the nature of a biased press, though. I'm not saying this is a positive development; I'm saying it's nothing new, is all.

Cass Sunstein's The Daily Me is apropos, although I think he's on the wrong track about it being new and/or necessary for the functioning of democracy. We had democracy in the Gilded Age. It wasn't great democracy by our snotty modern standards, but it did function, and you could argue that the political discipline of the late nineteenth-century machines as reinforced by the New Deal is all that has kept the Democrats from fragmenting.

I may need to blog about this tangent instead of taking up your comments with it.

[bryant]

Absolutely.

I'm not calling this out because I'm wholly surprised by it or because I think anyone else should be. I'm calling it out because I want people to have the data about how Hugh Hewitt thinks the next time they're judging something he says.

[gentlyepigrams]

I identified Hewitt as a conservative goober whose partisan opinion was unlikely to be worthwhile ages ago, so I am 100% with you on that part of the agenda.

We're in agreement--I'm just riffing on a tangent, which is why I should take it to my own blog.

[bryant]

Light dawns!

[kodi]

<nitpickery>(1) The only reasonable way those work out to 10 questions is if "For whom did the reporter vote..." is 5 questions, but "Do they attend church regularly and if so, in which denomination?" is only 1.

(2) For that matter, if we take for granted that these questions are material, is it really immaterial what denomination someone subscribes to if they don't attend church regularly? Is there honestly no difference between a lapsed Satanist and a lapsed Jew? Oh, wait, Jews don't go to "church."

(3) So at this point, I'm wondering if he's actively trying to make a point about poorly thought out questions, or if he's just being lazy because he doesn't really expect these questions to be answered, and he's just trying to come up with questions that will get under people's skin.

(4) And then I see the monstrosity of a sentence he's constructed around the term "partial birth abortion," one which confuses five out of nine justices.

(5) I thus conclude that the chief difference between Mr. Hewitt and myself is the degree of care I take when I'm attempting to tweak people.</nitpickery>

[kodi]

Aw, crap. All that, and I forgot to actually make my point.

From the excerpt alone, and moreso from reading the entire article, I had a very difficult time deciding whether it was supposed to be satirical. Honestly, I'm still not certain it isn't.

[bryant]

Read the rest of his blog. He's dead serious, sadly.

[kodi]

Read the rest of his blog.

Do I have to?

I didn't doubt that it was in earnest; I was just pointing out that if you attached that piece of writing to someone who someone who held different opinions, it would be a perfectly serviceable satire, right down to the wholly impracticable solution offered at the end.

[rfrancis]

What is interesting, by which I mean appalling but typical, to me, is that he's trying to do some kind of Ideological Triangulation trick based on a few questions. It's like the livejournal quizzes -- What Kind Of Reporter Are You? And I think we all know how accurate those quizzes are.

To put it another way: what do I care what a reporter thinks about, say, ANWR drilling, when they're reporting about Iraq? Answer: "You're either with us or agin' us," which is the real message of the ten questions.

-R

[kodi]

Man, Quizilla is AWFUL. I just always assumed that as little thought as people put into those things, it was a fast, convenient process to make one.

Anyway, here we go. The Hugh Hewitt Guide to Trustworthy Journalism

[gentlyepigrams]

That's freakin' hilarious in a horrible sort of way.

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

I guess it sort of underscores the point I have heard a few times recently -- that people aren't really interested in hearing *objective* news, as in, the type you might use to FORM or ANALYZE your own world view, they are more interested in hearing news reports that CONFIRM their own personal world views.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Gee, i'm shocked. It's Hugh Hewitt! He's a Robert Novak wannabe.