Transparency
: The news business demands transparency of the world it covers and now has to learn to be transparent itself. They’re not taking to the lesson easily.
After Rathergate, CBS should be opening all its doors and drawers to rebuild its credibility. But RatherBiased.com reports that some execs do not want to release the full investigative report on Rathergate being done now. That’ would be numbnutty in the extreme.
And Dan Okrent writes in today’s NY Times Public Editor column that Times editors are having problems learning that they should be talking about the paper with the paper’s public.
Here’s an idea: if the editors did the explaining themselves, maybe I wouldn’t have to do it for them.
For decades, the Fraternal Order of Falsely Modest Newspaper People has marched under an indelible banner: “We’re not the story,” it says. “The story’s the story.” …
I suppose the speak-for-itself trope made sense back when the image of the American newspaper was embodied in a freckled newsboy tossing a rolled paper onto a porch hung with geraniums. But in an age when the press is so widely regarded as a predatory and uncontrolled beast, the failure to allow readers a view inside the cage can only aggravate their worst suspicions.
