The Bad Conscience of the MSM Costs Two Reporters Their Jobs

For a nation so deeply committed to freedom of speech, it is surprising how easy it is to get fired for saying something that is politically incorrect or politically embarrassing. It has happened before to a lot of sports and media figures. It happened recently to two journalists. Octavia Nasr, a twenty year veteran and senior editor at CNN was fired for this comment:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah ... One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot.

Well, having a lot of respect for a "Hezbollah giant" and Holocaust denier does suggest questionable judgment. Likewise, David Weigel was fired from his job as a blogger for the Washington Post because of some very unfriendly things he said about conservatives on a supposedly private listserv. Weigel was hired to blog about conservatives, and one may wonder if he was capable of fair reporting.

If you are going to hire someone to comment on conservatives, and you want to produce a fair product, it isn't necessary to hire a conservative. You might however want to hire someone who has at least some sympathy for the people he is going to report on. That is a question about who to hire. Firing someone because of an opinion he or she expressed is something else.

It would be very unusual, and probably a bad sign, if a reporter had no biases. Every opinion is a bias, a leaning one way or another on a matter where knowledge is unavailable. A person without biases would be a person without opinions. Of course, a journalist may want her readers to believe that she is fair and that the accuracy of her reporting is as little distorted by bias as possible. The best way to do that is for the journalist to scrutinize her own opinions and try as best she can to see things from the other side.

It is a good thing rather than a bad one when readers have some idea what the journalist really thinks about conservatives, or Hezbollah, or anything else they report on. That way we can better be on the lookout for distorted reporting. It is an even better thing, I think, that reporters should enjoy the same freedom of speech as the rest of us, at least in a venue where that is appropriate.

Nasr and Weigel were not fired because their employers found some reason to suspect their competence or honesty as journalists. They were fired because they allowed their biases to become publically known. This suggests a bit of bad conscience on the part of the MSM. Nasr and Weigel careless let the rest of us see behind the veil. Neither should have been fired. This make journalism less honest rather than more honest, and it is an offense against freedom of speech.

Comments

[caheidelberger]

Agreed: journalism would be better if journalists could just come clean and speak as full citizens with vested interests in the good of the society. objectivity is a charade. I'd rather know the biases of my reporters and be able to evaluate their reporting accordingly rather than sifting through the pretense of neutrality.

Besides, even though I haven't watched CNN for a while, I remember Octavia Nasr. She's one of the few non-bubbleheads on TV news. I'd rather listen to her serious explanations of the Middle East than the empty banter of the pretty faces on the news-coich any day.

[Latimer the Cat]

Why do you call them "conservatives" when they're merely zionist establishment flunkies trying to "conserve" the foundational mythology and lies of the current usurping immoral and unlawful order?

[BillW]

Tsk tsk, Latimer. You;ve been skipping your meds again, haven't you?