"Objectivity" in Public Journalism and Public Policy

Matthew Yglesias writes:

TAPPED: AGAINST OBJECTIVITY. [Do] we need The New York Times?... [I]f it were to transform itself into a feisty Guardian-style paper and prompt the creation of a counterpart rightwing national broadsheet, I think that would be good. After all, ideology need not be the enemy of quality....

[I]t's useful to distinguish between two ideas Mike sort of runs together -- non-partisan and non-ideological. Partisan journalism as practiced by, say, Fred Barnes or (frequently) Fox News is pretty deplorable. Ideological journalism, on the other hand, tends to be interesting and informative even when you disagree with it. Oftentimes, ideology and partisanship overlap, but not always. Reason is rigidly ideological but not at all partisan since it espouses an ideology no political party that ever hopes to win elections would touch with a ten-foot pole.

On a loosely related note, Mike observes that sometimes he laughs when he hears "that so-and-so reporter is a tool of the Bush administration when I know that so-and-so's personal views aren't that far away from mine. But such criticism means, from so-and-so's perspective, that he or she is doing his or her job." That strikes me as an oft-crippling problem for neutral reporters who tend to respond to complaints about their work with the observation that since conservatives don't like them and liberals don't like them, they must be awesome truth-tellers. Well, maybe. Alternatively, maybe they're doing lots of bad work and pissing everyone off. Or maybe they're rigidly adhering to an elite consensus that is no less ideological than what the left or right are pushing. Or maybe they get complaints from both sides but one side is right and the other is wrong...

Let me say that the problem with the New York Times and the Washington Post--and so many of the others--today is not that they are "objective" but that they are not competent. The news pages of the Wall Street Journal are "objective" and they are very competent indeed. And the foreign, non-"objective" press--well, most of it is simply dreadful. That part of it which is partisan is totally dreadful. That part of it which is ideological is greatly mixed. Maybe being ideological gives you some innoculation against the diseases from which the American papers suffer. But maybe not.