[ Golden Gater Online - August 28, 1997 ]
Doctors bury their mistakes. Lawyers hang them. But journalists put theirs on the front page.
-Anonymous
This venomous quote could have been written by any number of individuals and groups that had a problem with Gater reporting last semester. For those of you new in town, our paper was accused of the greatest crime in journalism -- biased writing.
Objectivity is the backbone of the press. Stories should be entirely factual, with no personal agendas or outside influences bleeding into them. The reason is obvious: The press is a powerful tool of public manipulation. While the underlying sentiment may be insulting ñ that the public is stupid enough to believe anything set in front of them -- it has proven to be true enough. And so, after a series of stories that some students called racist and inflammatory, last semester's editor of this very page was called upon to represent the paper on public radio.
Don't get me wrong -- objectivity doesn't really exist. Reporters aren't robots; their writing is colored by their personal beliefs as well as their incentives to move upward in their careers. To demand a press corps full of completely objective reporters would require an army of faceless, race-less, ambition-less eunuchs. A blind charge to shake things up by reporting the truth is noble in a quixotic way, but any reporter with half a brain has already figured it out. It's just not possible, and it won't win you a Pulitzer.
Not that entirely slanted "news" is the way to go, either. Last year, Tim Redmond, executive editor of the award-winning San Francisco Bay Guardian, came to SF State to hold a lecture for journalism students. In a speech punctuated by high-pitched giggles and meandering asides regarding the hardships faced by long-haired journalists, he said there are many sides to a story, but his paper "reports the right side."
He meant the left side, of course. Papers with an agenda fall into a rut of self-promotion, hosing down their perceived enemies with a constant stream of vitriol -- in the Guardian's case, PG&E. It becomes a crusade, discounting every story the paper runs.
Journalism. It's a terrible fate. With an average starting salary of $18,000 for work that extends well beyond quitting time, it's not a leisurely trade. After years of sitting in front of a computer and shaking hands with interviewees, world-weary journalists find themselves on a bar stool, nostalgically clutching three fingers of bourbon. They huddle together, engaged in perpetual smarty-pants contests, one-upping each other with H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker quotes. They recount past story-glories in the same shell-shocked manner my older relatives reserve for their chilling accounts of Finn-Bolshevik combat in the winter of '41. Journalists take pride in their work and in their paper, and while it's easy to criticize their mistakes, the passion they display for their craft makes them anyone's worthy adversary.
But to ask an opinion page editor to represent a newspaper is simply ludicrous. The separation of the news and editorial portions of the paper has been compared to that of church and state. Because neither of our sections wants to be considered a church, we're just two opposing states. They're Stalin, I'm Hitler. So what I'm saying is this: the opinion page is exclusively opinionated. This page does not represent the Golden Gater. This page represents a collection of people spouting off whatever they happen to think. Keeping these key differences in mind, anti-Gater and anti-Opinion pieces are welcome and encouraged. It's open season, so start hunting.
[ Golden Gater - August 28, 1997 ]