Editor's letter: Peddling “the view from nowhere”

last updated 8 January 2015

If journalism were soccer, it would be called an “own goal”—when a player foolishly boots the ball into his own team’s net. The New York Times is widely known as a liberal newspaper, but last week it published a superbly reported exposé of a federal program designed to compensate black farmers for discrimination (see Talking points). Conservative activist Andrew Breitbart had targeted the program—called Pigford—for two years before his death, convinced it was riddled with fraud. But it took a team of four Times reporters to dig up damning, undeniable evidence that both the Clinton and Obama administrations had let Pigford devolve into an open trough, where anyone who asks for a $50,000 check gets one. So why would the Times score a goal for Breitbart’s team?

In the burgeoning world of New Media, there is much dismissive scorn for “legacy media” such as the Times. Pure objectivity is impossible, the argument goes, so why not just admit your biases and pursue your agenda openly, the way partisan websites and blogs do, rather than peddle “the view from nowhere”? The Times’ Pigford story answers that question, as do dozens of stories in that newspaper, and other remaining great newspapers, every week. I’m an enthusiastic consumer of the vast, cranky vein of partisan and personal commentary on the Web; it now plays a vital role in our media ecosystem. But agenda-driven journalists devote their energies to scoring points for Our Team; they ignore and/or dismiss stories and facts that don’t fit their liberal or conservative narrative. Traditional journalism has its flaws and limitations—but without it, we’d have very few facts, lots of argument, and nothing but point-scoring.