Let me get a few things out on the table before we start:
1. I wanted Kerry to win. Badly.
2. I am a journalist.
3. I have been a journalist for a month.
4. I couldn't tell anyone about #1 because of #2, and I don't know why because of #3.
I am also 23, straight and white and male. My parents are rich. I am on the left. And I'm demoralized. I should also disclose that almost everyone else I know is demoralized, too.
Phew. Been waiting to get that off my chest.
Tucker Carlson was on CNN Wednesday night, commenting on the divide in this country. You know the one — it's been beaten to death for the last six months, if not the last six years. Carlson, who's had a few weeks to recover from Jon Stewart's ass-kicking, was addressing the "liberal media bias" in this country.
Every journalist he knows was for Kerry, Carlson said. That had to have affected their coverage.
But Carlson wasn't making the typical indictment of the mainstream media. Given the Bush win, there was no reason to complain about a liberal bias. The point he was making was that since every journalist he knew was for Kerry, and journalists' only friends are journalists, most journalists he knew thought Kerry was going to win. That was the conversation they were having, and it was going on in the back pages, in the front pages — and in the break rooms — of America's newspapers.
But the New York Times didn't set out every day to put something on the cover that would make the president look bad. They engaged in what they thought the conversation was. Iraq. The War on Terrorism. The Economy.
In that conversation, Bush loses every time.
And for all my friends on those royal-blue coasts, that was the conversation to be had. A fellow young journalist working in Philadelphia told me today that he's worried about the nature of society. The facts were there. Bush fucked up. And, somehow, the country let him off the hook.
But as Carlson and every other talking head in the country is pointing out, there were two conversations going on. Even Times columnist Thomas Friedman said it. This election broke down by who got their news from the Times, and who got it from Fox. And on Election Day, more Americans were talking about moral values than about Iraq.
You can't turn on the TV without hearing that the Democratic Party is wallowing in self-reflection, desperately looking within itself to find a connection to America's heartland. Perhaps the mainstream media, which lost in this election too, needs to do the same.
But what about us in the good old alternative press?
It doesn't take much snooping around to figure out that everyone on the editorial staff was disappointed in last week's results. Amidst some seriously frayed nerves in our editorial meeting (which coincided with Kerry's concession speech), the election forced some internal reflection. Should we impose an outright liberal agenda? Did we (gasp) already have one?
There's a distinction between an agenda and a bias, and I certainly have the latter — just look back at the top of this page. But being a lefty, or white, or 23, or anything else that I happen to be isn't going to change how I report. My stories will be fair, and they will be accurate.
Working for an alternative paper, I have the freedom to explain my bias and move out from behind the veil of objectivity. But that leaves a lot of open space — space that's sometimes tough to navigate.
And in the last few days, trying to cover an election that I cared deeply about, that freedom has posed some rather fundamental questions. Keep in mind, I'm new at this.
What should have been my response when the MoveOn volunteer asked me who I was voting for?
I told him I couldn't say, that I was a reporter. The kid, exactly my age, laughed. Then he told me I must be a Republican.
Ouch.
It's probably ridiculous that my first instinct was to be hurt, but that's what it was. To me, we didn't seem all that different. I'd actually been planning on volunteering for Kerry before I took a job at the Planet. The kid was dressed in beat-up jeans and a T-shirt. Aside from the decent shirt and pants that I had on, beat-up jeans and T-shirts are all I own. He had come from San Francisco a few weeks before, exactly like I had.
And now, somehow, I was the bad guy. Now I was the one getting misrepresented.
The hurt wore off pretty quickly, but I still can't figure out what the difference would have been if I'd just answered his question.
Not only had I already voted, but our newspaper had already gone to bed. I wasn't going to write a story on the MoveOn event. And on top of that, we were less than 12 hours away from the polls opening anyway. Who I was voting for wasn't going to affect any coverage coming out before the election.
But it wasn't going to help much either. I would have felt cooler maybe, but that's an issue I'm going to have to deal with on my own.
But what if I had divulged my biases to the Mel Martinez supporter I talked to on Election Day? No doubt he assumed them anyway — the guy would only identify himself as Paul.
What if I had used the freedom of the alternative press to figure out the other side? Maybe if I'd come out and told him that I was for Castor (or that my boss' partner was working on her campaign), he would have taken some time to try and convince me that I was wrong. Maybe it would have sparked some passion in the guy, instead of the pointed annoyance I got when I told him I was a reporter.
Maybe then I would have been let into that other conversation. You know the one — it just handed George W. Bush and 51 percent of the voters in this country a historic win.
And it handed us a host of questions.
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 2004.