Reflections on journalism and ideology

Eugene Robinson writes today about the ideology of journalism in the U.S. and its contradictions. It's not news to those of us who study the press, but it is more insightful than much of the navel-gazing that the MSM engages in during (and, especially, after) election campaigns.

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com We journalists like to think we're too smart to be used by one side or the other in a political campaign. In a sense, we're followers of Adam Smith: We believe in an omniscient free marketplace of news in which myriad individual decisions by reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, commentators and media barons -- decisions about what to cover and how to cover it -- somehow miraculously end up maximizing the truth. We claim not to be ideological, but this is our ideology. At the same time, though, we think of ourselves as working in the public interest. We repeatedly remind everyone that our right to do our jobs however we see fit is enshrined in the First Amendment. We love to quote Thomas Jefferson about how he would rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers. Rarely do we grapple seriously with the way our Adam Smith tendencies and our Thomas Jefferson tendencies sometimes work at cross-purposes.