The latest debates over journalists’ separating their views from their reporting sends me back more than half a century to the volunteer work I did on behalf of the Long Island congressional campaign of anti-war activist Allard Lowenstein when I was a 24-year-old sportswriter at Newsday, recruiting stars like Bill Bradley and Jim Bouton. I knew it was wrong but this was 1968 and, after all, I was covering sports not politics.
Flash forward a couple of years to an expose Newsday reporters Bob Wyrick and Pete Bowles unearthed, tying thousands of dollars in payoffs to two Daily News reporters from the local Republican Party through their wives’ no-show jobs. In a desperate (and failed) attempt to kill the story they threatened to expose a Newsday reporter’s ties to local Dems, eventually citing my work for Lowenstein. (By then I had moved on to news reporting.) When Wyrick noted that I had not been paid and did what I had out of conviction one of their targets declared, “That was worse. We were in it for the money. He was a true believer.”
Re Joe Kahn, I think that issue of not wanting to debate cuts both ways, specifically on Israel-Gaza, Dick. I think people like him don't want their essentially establishmentarian views questioned.
But here is the problem: there is no objective “reasonable.” And that is what I think many of the newer and more diverse colleagues are trying to tell us. This is not ti say there are no lines to be drawn nor that every reaction is “reasonable.” But reasonableness as a proposed standard, I think, just sends us back to the same place — whose “reasonable”?
The answer must be the reasonableness of a reasonable person, using an inclusive definition. So, not a reasonable white man, but a sensitive, empathetic, truly pan-societal norm.
Reasonableness is a critical component of many of the rules by which we live-- of duty of care in civil law, and in many instances in criminal law, just to name two. If we abandon the possibility of finding this, the only alternative becomes overly-prescriptive hyper-detailed rules, which grow ever-longer as new circumstances arise, and ultimately make us all feel constrained.
The latest debates over journalists’ separating their views from their reporting sends me back more than half a century to the volunteer work I did on behalf of the Long Island congressional campaign of anti-war activist Allard Lowenstein when I was a 24-year-old sportswriter at Newsday, recruiting stars like Bill Bradley and Jim Bouton. I knew it was wrong but this was 1968 and, after all, I was covering sports not politics.
Flash forward a couple of years to an expose Newsday reporters Bob Wyrick and Pete Bowles unearthed, tying thousands of dollars in payoffs to two Daily News reporters from the local Republican Party through their wives’ no-show jobs. In a desperate (and failed) attempt to kill the story they threatened to expose a Newsday reporter’s ties to local Dems, eventually citing my work for Lowenstein. (By then I had moved on to news reporting.) When Wyrick noted that I had not been paid and did what I had out of conviction one of their targets declared, “That was worse. We were in it for the money. He was a true believer.”
In retrospect, they had a point.
Re Joe Kahn, I think that issue of not wanting to debate cuts both ways, specifically on Israel-Gaza, Dick. I think people like him don't want their essentially establishmentarian views questioned.
But here is the problem: there is no objective “reasonable.” And that is what I think many of the newer and more diverse colleagues are trying to tell us. This is not ti say there are no lines to be drawn nor that every reaction is “reasonable.” But reasonableness as a proposed standard, I think, just sends us back to the same place — whose “reasonable”?
The answer must be the reasonableness of a reasonable person, using an inclusive definition. So, not a reasonable white man, but a sensitive, empathetic, truly pan-societal norm.
Reasonableness is a critical component of many of the rules by which we live-- of duty of care in civil law, and in many instances in criminal law, just to name two. If we abandon the possibility of finding this, the only alternative becomes overly-prescriptive hyper-detailed rules, which grow ever-longer as new circumstances arise, and ultimately make us all feel constrained.
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