Reporter, Reveal Thyself

Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, makes a cogent argument in this election season for making political journalists reveal their votes and their views. It's a lengthy argument, and worthy of your consideration, but the key sentence is this: "I say that journalists have a responsibility to reveal their own views and votes — even as they endeavor to report apart from them with fairness, completeness, accuracy, and intellectual honesty — and we have a right to judge their success or failure accordingly as we also have a right to judge their roles in the stories they are covering. "

Jarvis himself has a long record as a journalist, and he's one of the more interesting thinkers who are trying to redefine journalism in a new media age. The key word, as he says, is "transparency." We all have viewpoints. We all have biases. The key is not to pretend to complete objectivity but to announce those biases. Then the public can judge whether we are capable of overcoming them or not.