One of the unfortunate things about the evolution of journalism in the 1990s was that everyone who was a member of a so-called victim class had an axe to grind when reporting the news. Nearly all black, gay, lesbian and Hispanic reporters who worked for me during that period felt it was their duty to report their stories from the black, gay, lesbian or Hispanic perspective.
At one end of that bias scale this wouldn’t be much of a problem. It could be argued that a new perspective could help the paper and the reader. But at the other end of that scale, which, unfortunately, is where most of them were, reporting meant forcing their group’s issues and grievances on the readers of a general interest newspaper.
I had constant battles with reporters who couldn’t understand that neither I, as their editor, nor the reader had any interest in their ideology, cause celebre, their societal grudges, or their agenda pushing. As you can imagine, your run-of-the-mill white-guilt lefty reporter was as much of a management headache as the victim class scribes. To them, just reporting the news was not enough. They were out to “make a difference.”
You had to be constantly on the lookout for agenda pushing and side-taking with such reporters. I soon became suspicious of any reporter who very visibly claimed to be a member of any politically correct victim group. I thought about that experience today when I read this:
A reporter who helped write the first and positive New York Times story on the Ground Zero Mosque was trained by the group run by mosque leader Feisal Abdul Rauf, according to that group’s website.
Rauf’s organization, the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), touted the journalist’s participation in a training program by ASMA’s “Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow” (MLT).
“Media trainings showed immediate results,” ASMA’s 2009 year-end report said.
The reporter’s name is Sharaf Mowjood, and I’m sure his Times editor thought he was doing the really politically correct thing by assigning a Muslim reporter to this explosive story. In his white-guilt way, I’m sure he felt that Mowjood would approach the story objectively, but it took outrage and blogs to get to the meat of this story, which Mowjood refused to see, or at least report.
The truth is, journalism schools are training victim-class reporters to be, well, victim-class reporters. The ivory tower lefty professors want a biased news product. But take it from me: If you don’t want that as an editor, you need to ride herd on any reporter who seems a bit too anxious to proclaim their victim status. They think they’re there to push their cause and “change the world,” and that every newspaper is an alt-weekly.
I makes you wonder about journalism schools.
