I'm Right, in Any Case

Writing in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review, Mitchell Stephens argues that newspaper stories must start providing insight as well as information, if they're to keep a competitive edge next to Internet sources, cable, and radio. Just as monthly and bimonthly magazines make up for their slow response with increased analysis of current events, daily newspapers will have to make up for what is beginning to look like a slow response with increased analysis.

In effect, this means that the writer must put more of himself in the story, and we shouldn't worry so much about objectivity.

Besides the pressure from Internet sources, there are reasons newspapers might head this way that Stephens doesn't mention. Objectivity was important to newspapers because it allowed their stories to appeal to more people. A paper that published opinionated stories quickly alienated a good portion of its readership. But as our culture becomes increasingly polarized, it becomes increasingly difficult to find neutral middle ground. I don't think there are presently any newspapers in America that aren't generally considered to be either liberal or conservative. This may always have been the case, but it wasn't always the case that liberals and conservatives saw papers on the opposing side as radical and worthy of destruction (as Ann Coulter apparently did when she said: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building").

It might make more sense, then, for papers to solidify the loyalty of the readers in their perceived ideological bases.

The downside of this is obvious. However unrealistic it might seem to think that there is an objective truth, the semblance of an objective truth has been a stronghold of cohesion in our culture. When we all read the same newspapers, our varying reactions to the same story are personal; but when conservatives read one paper and liberals read another, our varying reactions to the same story are tribal.

But who, faced with a newspaper full of stale facts that were already broadcast on the radio and a newspaper full of thoughtful analysis, would not pick the latter?