International Law

The longer-term issue is the question of how the "culture of exposure", as David Brooks put it in a column last week on Stanley McChrystal's ouster, will reshape the world of journalism, as the spotlight is turned on the journalists themselves. Clearly, the safest position in such a media landscape is to make your political opinions clear and to write for an outfit with an open political slant. Writers at National Review online don't have to worry about being exposed as knee-jerk conservatives, and writers at the Nation need not fret about being exposed as flaming liberals. But such publications find it difficult to report effectively on the enemy camp. The Nation's Max Blumenthal becomes the focus of jeering scrums when he shows up at conservative gatherings, and...well, actually I'm not aware of any conservative writers who encounter difficulties at liberal gatherings. But perhaps there are some. In any case, it's very hard for reporters at ideologically liberal outfits to do what Dave Weigel does so well: to cover conservatives and the tea-party movement without, yourself, being a conservative.

And that's what makes the Post's failure to defend Mr Weigel so disappointing. It indicates that reporters with bylines at non-ideological journalistic outfits, like the Post and other old-fashioned newspapers, will only be able to cover ideological politics if they can amputate their own political opinions. That's an oppressive thing to force upon someone, a form of political correctness all its own, and like all political correctness, it results in a smothered, distorted, false kind of speech. The only way I can think of to get around this problem, to allow journalists to report and analyse politics in an honest and intelligent fashion without worrying about accusations of bias based on the contents of private emails, would be to have a newspaper where the reporters don't have any bylines, where everything is written in a collective voice. But that's a crazy idea that would obviously never work.

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