Objectivity, 21st Century Style

•  “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.”

– H.L. Mencken, c. 1942.

• “I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”

– The late Deborah Howell, then the Post’s ombudswoman, November 14, 2008.

• “At Washington Post, mum’s the word on JournoList.”

– Byron York, the Washington Examiner, July 20th, 2010.

• “Much of the suspicion of press bias comes from two assumptions that are commonplace, if contradictory. The first is that reporters are out to get their subjects. The second is that the press is too close to its subjects—in the parlance of journalists, ‘in the tank.’ The press has been guilty of both sins at various times.”

– Evan Thomas in Newsweek, then still owned by the Washington Post, March 1st, 2008, in “The Myth of Objectivity,” an article whose subhead claims, “Is the mainstream press unbiased? No, but we aren’t ideological.”

No, of course not:

“When the dean of Columbia Journalism School whips out a camera to take your picture…” Kathy Shaidle notes, “Just wow.” O’Keefe is deep, deep inside the heads of “objective” journalists who just love having their century-old tactics thrown back at them.