Reporting, opinions and 'just plain rude'

Last week's column on the mainstream media elicited many responses, most of which agreed with me that East Coast reporters have a tendency to skew the news with their own left-leaning viewpoints.

A few people chided me for being a member of the mainstream media myself.

Of course, I do consider the Daily Inter Lake to be part of the mainstream media in northwest Montana, and we need to be scrutinized by our local readers the same way I am attempting to scrutinize certain national voices. I welcome that scrutiny and the opportunity to talk to our readers about their concerns regarding coverage of particular stories. We understand that we are a community newspaper, and have an obligation to reflect the community in certain fundamental ways.

There is nothing wrong with being mainstream; the problem is when the mainstream media becomes arrogant and boastful, trying to impose its views on everyone else instead of acting as a conduit for all viewpoints.

I'm not sure how anyone could disagree, although a few people tried to get the mainstream media off the hook by pointing out that I myself was expressing an opinion.

That's certainly true, but with a significant difference - I am not a reporter. As a columnist, it is my job to have an opinion. The same thing applies in my role as an editorial writer when I am expressing the opinion of the Inter Lake's editorial board. And to be fair, I enjoy reading well-argued opinions very much because they show me new ways to think about issues and can be quite entertaining as well. So I am not proposing doing away with opinion.

But reporters have an obligation to maintain an objective approach to the stories they cover. That's not to say they don't have opinions, but if they are going to have credibility as reporters, they need to keep those opinions out of their stories. Instead, we've grown used to reporters becoming talking heads on television, where they speculate incessantly about the meaning of stories or the outcome of stories or the virtue of the people they write about.

And that means those reporters have not the slightest fig leaf of objectivity to cover the very public part they play in the national debate. That of course has led to a loss of credibility not just for them, but for the national media as a whole, and by extension all the media.

As a rule, opinion writers should limit their opinions to matters that they don't also cover as reporters. Reporters should limit their reporting to the facts and to the opinions of others. In the past, reporters typically understood this distinction, and made an effort to keep the line clear.

But that has not always been the case. Consider, for instance, the case of Helen Thomas, the "dean" of the White House press corps.

She was the top Washington reporter for UPI for many years, and loved to insert herself and her opinions into the stories she wrote, but now she is an avowedly left-wing columnist. That gets her off the hook for having opinions, but it doesn't justify her disrespectful performance a few weeks ago during President Bush's March 21 press conference.

Rather than asking a question of the president to elicit information, Thomas asked a question for the purpose of grandstanding and making a political point. Don't forget this is the woman who called George W. Bush "the worst president ever," so we have no reason to expect objectivity.

But I still don't understand where a political disagreement gives someone the right to be just plain rude. Unfortunately, Thomas isn't just rude, she is gleefully rude, and in this case she accused the president of going to war with Iraq for secret reasons and then of lying to the American public about why we went to war.

Here's her question, in part:

"Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war?"

The president, being a gentlemen, did not accuse Thomas of impersonating a journalist, but instead responded firmly but graciously to her canard. After first taking exception to her premise that he "wanted war," he assured the American people that he had learned the lessons of September 11 and that no American president could ever again take the chance of doing nothing while those abroad are plotting attacks against us.

He also reiterated that Saddam had the chance to avoid attack by disarming and disclosing the nature of his weapons programs under U.N. Resolution 1441. "And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him."

This notion bothers Thomas and other Bush's critics because stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were never found, but nonetheless the United Nations had laid down the law with Saddam and he chose to play chicken with the arms inspectors instead of coming clean. President Bush made sure Saddam lost that game of chicken by acting swiftly and decisively.

Of course, nothing the president said really interested Ms. Thomas. She wasn't at the press conference for the purpose of interviewing the president; she was there to embarrass him. I'm sure she doesn't get her marching orders from the Democratic Party, but she seems to know the parade route by heart.

Let's face it. In the strictly partisan struggle which has befallen our nation, facts are ultimately less important than talking points. The spin machines are waiting in the wings to twist everything for maximum political advantage, such as claiming that what the president said was a lie. Thomas was just helping matters along by starting with the premise that President Bush, like Cretans, is always a liar.

But maybe that is the premise of all Democrats, or at least the vocal ones. A reader, for instance, wrote to me to complain that the president was distorting history when he talked about Saddam's response to Resolution 1441. Here is the president's comment again:

"And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him."

The reader was sure the president was lying.

"That's not what happened," he wrote. "We got the resolution passed. Saddam called our bluff and allowed the inspectors in. President Bush pressed ahead with the invasion. Saddam did not deny inspectors - just ask U.N. inspector Hans Blitz - at the time of the invasion he said the inspections were working, and that Saddam did not have WMDs."

No one can disagree with the notion that Saddam did not have WMDs at the time of the invasion, but that does not mean he was in compliance with 1441. Let's look at the facts.

Former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay reported to Congress on Jan. 28, 2004: "In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, [as] I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of Resolution 1441."

In that October 2003 report, Kay had said, "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."

The report makes very interesting reading for anyone who thinks Saddam was a misunderstood pacifist during the stretches when he wasn't ordering mass murders of Iraqi civilians - or for anyone who insists that "Bush lied, so people died."

Perhaps Helen Thomas could even look it over before she embarrasses herself in public again. But you know that won't happen. She enjoys the spotlight too much.