Journalism Junction

A leaked memo of mine protesting a National Press Foundation board award to Fox News anchor Brit Hume made the press recently, and kicked up a stink with people whose idea of discussion is flaming your e-mail box. But liking or disliking Fox News was never the point. What's important is acknowledging it as something new and important on the landscape of mainstream American journalism.

Having a clear partisan viewpoint is, after all, a time-honored tradition, one that held sway well into the 20th century in American journalism and is still the tradition in a number of democracies today. There's a lot to be said for it. In the heyday of America's partisan press in the 1800s, voting patterns were far higher than today. Indeed, it's easier to make a news report compelling if you aren't attempting to make it balanced — a big part of Fox's success.

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Nor, of course, is Fox News the first partisan voice to emerge since the quest for objectivity so imperfectly but so earnestly took over American journalism. There are opinion journals from both ends of the political spectrum. There are editorial pages from both ends of the political spectrum. And, then, there is talk radio — which has had a huge impact on the public debate, as this recent interview with Kathleen Hall Jamieson notes.

But Fox News is arguably the first mainstream, widely distributed news medium to leave the objectivity god behind. And it looks as if it will be far from the last. A group calling itself "Progress Media," for example, is now aiming to form a liberal radio network, and Al Gore is pursuing a liberal cable TV network.

If we're jettisoning the objectivity commandment, though, shouldn't we have the discussion? You can make a strong case for it, you can make a strong case against it, but you can't make any case at all until you acknowledge that it's happening.