Kurtz on Tony Snow

I like Howard Kurtz of Washington Post and CNN fame, even when I disagree with him. Unlike many of his colleagues, he often explores in various ways the one great sacred cow of journalism that is not supposed to be messed with - bias in the press. Kurtz has courageously bucked media orthodoxy in proclaiming a number of obvious truths, such as the press being in love with Obama and not really trying to hide it that much, and the dangerous amalgamation at NBC of supposedly objective reporters with the left-wing mouth foamers of MSNBC. But Kurtz also takes on more conservative media such as Fox News and properly disects the spin out of Bill O'Reilly's No Spin schtick. In my view, Kurtz does not give press people a free pass, and that is refreshing considering the degree to which the press operates as if it is above and beyond the kind of accountability that they regularly (and unevenly) try to apply to the people they cover.

But in today's Post, Kurtz suggests that the recently deceased Tony Snow "went too far in challenging reporters' motives..." during his time as WH press secretary. I would respectfully disagree with Kurtz. If in saying this, Kurtz is referring to the now famous standoff between Snow and NBC's David Gregory, in which Snow accused Gregory of being a Democratic partisan and then later apologizing, fair enough. But because Kurtz's statement wasn't qualified by something like "sometimes" or "occasionally", it reads as if Kurtz thought Snow's practice of challenging the motives of the WH press corps was routinely excessive. I strongly disagree.

In treating as fair game the perspectives that WH reporters personally (and therefore professionally) operated with and brought into the WH briefing room, Snow was confronting reporters with a much needed reality check (that, naturally, didn't take). The idea that journalism of any kind is an unbiased, objective enterprise is the kind of fiction that is less plausible than a literal reading of most children's fairy tales. Such a view, I believe, is informed at root by a fundamentally and seriously erroneous understanding of the human condition. While few are bold enough to suggest that their personal perspectives are devoid of bias and presupposition, a traditional mainstay of mainline journalism is that such perspectives can be marginalized or put safely away in a locker when a journalist performs his job as a supposedly objective reporter. While journalism thought has modified this cardinal virtue somewhat to allow for the reality that personal perspectives inescapably creep into one's vocational approach, the view persists that such perspectives can still be marginalized to the point where they become immaterial in how a reporter does her job. Such naive objectivism is a fantasy that deserves and needs to be confronted and exposed for the fiction that it is. Tony Snow attempted to do just that.

As I have previously suggested on multiple occasions, the biases, presuppositions, and basic first-order principles that people operate with - what Polanyi calls 'tacit' or 'personal' knowledge rather than scientifically proven knowledge, inevitably shapes how one sees the world and one's place in the world. 'Personal knowledge' can't be walled off from life or turned on and off at the switch. Humanity simply doesn't work that way. This can't help but considerably influence our approach to life's pursuits, including our vocational pursuits. When it comes to journalism, such perspectives inevitably shape the kinds of questions a reporter does and doesn't ask, the kinds of stories they do or don't pursue, the kinds of issues they do or don't consider newsworthy, and whether the tenor of a story is positive or negative. In the case of the WH press corps, where it has been repeatedly documented that the pool of WH reporters votes Democratic by 9 to 1, it is simply ridiculous to think that such ideological groupthink isn't a factor in how the news out of the White House gets reported night after night. And while the journalism profession can continue to blame the decline in their perceived trustworthiness on other factors just like pastors in mainline denominations blame their declining membership on everything except their slip from theological orthodoxy, the reality is that the press's unwillingness to thoughtfully address the issue of bias is crippling their effectiveness.

Tony Snow was willing to take on this sacred cow. It is little surprise that press folks didn't like it much. Circling the wagons and being defensive is always a more natural reaction than serious reflection, especially when the criticism comes from an 'outsider' like a conservative thinker. But the longer the press continues to operate with a faulty understanding of humanity and defends their allegiance to it with knee-jerk defensiveness, the sooner their profession will be beyond redemption with the public.