Do Pro-Obama Posts Mean Journos Aren’t Doing Their Jobs?

If there’s one type of bias that reporters are supposed to lock away in their hearts of hearts and not share with anyone, it’s political bias. As any Journo 101 textbook will tell you, the Public relies on the Fourth Estate to keep watch over the powerful; fairly or not, too-cozy coverage of the power elite inevitably raises questions of influence-peddling. In fact some might argue the Bush administration was able to sell the Iraq War so effectively not least because it convinced the Washington press corps that they were all buddies.

This is why a recent Twitter post by The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz leaves a slightly foul taste. “MSNBC asks: Is Obama’s Honeymoon Over? That’s what happens when a president tries to do tough things. And he’s still at 59% in WP/ABC poll.”

Mr. Kurtz probably wouldn’t put a line like “That’s what happens when a president tries to do tough things” in his column, Media Notes; even if he wanted to, we suspect some editor would likely cut it. But whatever you think of it as a platform, Twitter is quick, unmediated, personal: it lets journalists reveal the beating human heart behind the bylines. If Howard Kurtz (who, it should be noted, has been accused of right-wing bias in the past) feels like shooting out something that could easily be construed as a pr0-Obama fragment, what’s wrong with that?

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe described the mainstream media as a “hypocritical Victorian gent:” all of its supposed rules of propriety cause important facts to be left out. The method by which the media suppresses opinions and angles inevitably gives rise to a new set of prejudices and biases in the way stories are covered, which are all the harder to root out because they’re a function of the system and not the people inside it.

In this light, Twitter is probably a Good Thing for journalism. If perfect objectivity is a myth, then getting a personal sense of what the people who write the news are like may be the best way to parse its biases.

Far be it from us to wag our fingers at Mr. Kurtz, who’s reputation as one of America’s best journalists is well earned. However, reporters need to be very careful about how even their tweets can be interpreted. Between bloggers and columnists, news has become much too polarized into political categories as it is. Microblogging is well and good, but when the most trusted arbiters of information use it to muddle their personal views with their work, all that’s left are Freeps and HuffPos.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.