Recently, Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank agreed to this interview with Brain Terminal. I solicited questions from the public, wrote some of my own, and assembled the following list of 18 questions, which were then e-mailed to Mr. Milbank.
His responses appear in text like this...
...and my comments, if any, appear after his responses in text like this.
It was very kind of Mr. Milbank to volunteer for this interview, and I appreciate his time. Thanks are also in order for all the folks who sent in questions.
To present readers with the truth as best it can be determined, and to do so in a lively and accessible way.
2. Do you believe it is possible for journalists and editors to completely separate their personal biases from their reporting?
People are not objects and therefore pure objectivity is elusive. It is also undesirable. He-said/she-said journalism doesn't get to the truth. We don't need factual relativism in journalism any more than we need moral relativism in society. The standard should be fairness.
Certainly it is not possible to banish all bias, but there are many biases that are not political. I'd argue the journalistic bias toward conflict, and toward elites, is much stronger than any political/ideological bias. Hopefully the most powerful bias is toward the truth.
3. Would you describe yourself as a straight-news journalist, an opinion columnist, or perhaps a mix of the two?
I covered the Bush White House during the first term. I am now beginning a twice weekly column.
I'm not entirely sure if that answers the question. My assumption is that when you covered the White House, you were in a "straight-news journalist" role. I'm also assuming that writing a "column" means that it contains opinion as opposed to straight news. I think the press and the public would be better served if the precise definitions of these different roles were more widely understood. The Washington Post could start by more clearly defining these roles within the paper.
4. The Pew Research Center polled national journalists and found that only 7% consider themselves conservative, yet nearly 5 times as many call themselves liberal. And during the 1996 presidential election, a survey of Washington political reporters found that 9 out of 10 voted for President Clinton. Do you think that this ideological imbalance colors how the press covers politics?
Don't know about that poll, but it would follow from your question that 58% are neither liberal nor conservative. I'm certainly one of those. I'm also not one of the nine in 10 mentioned in the 1996 survey. As for ideological imbalance, I refer you to the answer to question 2.
I suspect that the number of people identifying themselves as moderate may be overstated because people in the press seem reluctant to admit their own views; doing so would make it harder to claim objectivity. According to Bernie Goldberg, Dan Rather considers himself a moderate, and he considers the New York Times to be a moderate paper.
5. Do you believe that greater intellectual diversity among reporters would help ensure more thorough, accurate coverage of the news?
I think there's extraordinary diversity already -- people from all parts of the country, all types of schools, all kinds of backgrounds. If your question is whether there should be some sort of conservative affirmative action, I'm with President Bush in saying there should be no litmus test: only good reporters and writers.
No, the question was not about political affirmative action in the media. It was simply whether or not intellectual diversity--more minds with more points of view--would make for more solid reporting. I think it would, because it seems that there are very few people challenging the political orthodoxy in the newsrooms of organizations like The New York Times and CBS News. If there were people at CBS News balancing out the obvious ideologues like Mary Mapes, I don't think they ever would have aired those bogus memos.
6. Why is it that some stories seem to get ignored by the mainstream press? For example, Enron was covered extensively, and many of us believe the coverage was skewed to have a political impact. Yet, the U.N. Oil for Food scandal is virtually ignored, even though it might amount to the biggest financial scam in the history of mankind. Are reporters unwilling to call into question the assumed legitimacy of the U.N. for some reason? Do you think that the political views of reporters are at play in the lack of coverage?
Huh. In Nexis, I'm getting 104 hits for "Oil for Food" in the Washington Post over the past year.
The question is about the press in general. The level of coverage given to a specific story is reflected in how widely known the story is. Enron was a "flood the zone" story, routinely placed on the front page and at the top of news broadcasts. Despite being a much larger financial scam and much worse in that it allowed Saddam Hussein to buy allies, the U.N. Oil for Food scandal for some reason never was selected by the mainstream press as a "flood the zone" story. Ask the average person whether they've heard of Enron or the U.N. Oil for Food scandal. Ask the average person whether they've heard of Abu Ghraib or the U.N. mass rape scandal. I don't have any hard data to back it up, and I'm not normally a bettin' man, but I know where I'm putting my money on that one.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time so I generally go only when somebody has provided me with a link. I'd like to get a sense of what the best dozen-or-so blogs are, left, right, and center, if your readers have any suggestions.
Glenn Reynolds at InstaPundit.com has a nice, interesting mix and is my general launchpad into the blogosphere. I've opened up a discussion thread for other suggestions.
8. In your coverage of the recent inauguration, you mention that the crowd was "full of wealthy Republicans." What data led you to say that? I would bet that the crowd at any inauguration--Democrat or Republican--is probably more wealthy than the average citizen. So what was your precise point? Do you routinely cite the financial background of crowds, or were you trying to leave a specific impression?
Your description is quite inaccurate.
First, this was a column, not a news report. Second, let's look at the context. Here's how the story begins:
"It was just as John F. Kerry must have dreamed it would be: There he stood on the Capitol dais on a sunny Inauguration Day, looking presidential in blue scarf and overcoat, as the Marine Band played "Hail to the Chief" before the swearing-in.
"But wait! Something was terribly wrong. Kerry's seat assignment was in the seventh row. And every time they flashed his picture on the Jumbotron, the crowd -- full of wealthy Republicans -- jeered."
So the line you cite is in the story as the punchline: Kerry imagining himself at his own inauguration but finding out that it's not for him.
As for the 'data' to support the point, this is in the story, too: "The big donors -- the "underwriters" who gave $250,000 for the inauguration and the "sponsors" who could afford no more than $100,000 -- sat up front in "Perfect Party" plastic folding chairs. Farther back, demonstrators unfurled an antiwar sign and booed Bush before they were shouted down by supporters who chanted "USA!"
"The result was predictably partisan: dueling cheers, from the orchestra seats for former president George H.W. Bush, and from the cheap seats for former president Bill Clinton."
Two points. First, I think the average newspaper reader isn't aware of the distinction between a "column" and a "news report". How many people are aware that in one election cycle someone is a "columnist" and in the next, they're a "reporter". The average person just sees the name Dana Milbank and knows that he writes for the Washington Post, which is a newspaper, and therefore whatever Dana Milbank writes is news and not commentary. People expect opinion in the editorials and on the op-ed page, but I don't think most people are aware of the blurred line when opinion-y "News Analysis" pieces appear next to straight news. In other industries, you'd be required to have a warning label: "This column represents the author's opinions, and should not be considered hard news" or "What appears below is a objective news column, and should be free of opinion."
Second, the punchline as you put it does not depend upon the financial status of the crowd, it depends on the crowd's political affiliation.
Mushy. I'm a Chuck Hagel Republican or a Joe Lieberman Democrat. Take your pick.
I'll take the latter, thanks.
I think he's exceptionally personable.
11. In the heat of the presidential campaign, you co-write an article called "From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity." The headline leaves the impression that no political candidate in American history ran a more negative campaign than President Bush did in 2004. While you quoted a small number of "experts" who made the point that the Bush campaign was negative, such an absolute statement seems hard to justify without concrete evidence. What research did you conduct to back up the claim of "unprecedented negativity"?
Heat of the campaign? That story appeared on May 31, more than 3 months before the formal start of the general election. The report was based on advertising through that point.
What "research" did we conduct? Well, the story spells this out very clearly, in addition to citing experts for historical perspective. Here's the relevant passage from the story:
"Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate"
So the Bush campaign didn't dispute it. Strange that you are now.
The Bush campaign may not have disputed the data above, but that data still does not support the claim of "unprecedented negativity," a claim so absolute that you'd need to study every presidential campaign since the American Revolution. And even if you did, trying to assign accurate measures of "negativity" would keep a stadium full of social scientists arguing for a lifetime.
12. During the presidential campaign, the Washington Post was forced to issue corrections for at least three of your stories. (One correction was for a story on 24 September 2004, and the other two corrections ran on 16 September 2003 and 18 April 2004.) In all cases, your errors cast the Bush Administration in a negative light. Do your errors tend to all fall one way, or can you cite any corrections for errors that cast liberal Democrats in a negative light?
You flatter me. I've written nearly 500 stories over the past two years. About one in 25 requires a correction. Fortunately, it's almost always a misspelling or a botched number. So let's go to the ones you mention.
One, April 18 2004, doesn't seem to exist in the database, so I don't know what you're referring to.
Another, Sept. 24, 2004, involves the length of service for national guard troops in Iraq. The soldiers had told me 18-24 months. This was apparently the time of activation not the time in Iraq, which is 12-15 months. A bit of a stretch to suggest this is some deliberate effort to cast Bush in a negative light, wouldn't you say?
The third, Sept. 15, 2003, was an article with a joint byline. I didn't write the part of the story that was corrected so I can't address it specifically.
Do corrections ever go the other way? Sure. See the May 2, 2004 Sunday Politics column I wrote. I said U.S. combat deaths in Iraq at the time were 421. In fact they were 521.
The 18 April 2004 correction referred to in the question is contained in an article from the Ombudsman of the Washington Post.
13. Your press pool reports for the Washington Post have sarcastically referred to President Bush as "our maximum leader" and "the compassionate president". Aren't pool reports supposed to be objective? And if so, how does inserting such subjective wording fit with the notion of objectivity?
Your readers probably don't know this but pool reports by tradition don't refer to the president by name. It's often "potus" -- president of the united states -- or some other euphemism. The "compassionate president" presumably occurred when he was doing a "compassion" event. I also called him "our protagonist" in the tradition of 19th century literature.
14. Have you seen any changes in the way that the establishment press operates since the blogs became popular? If so, what changes have you seen?
Seems a lot of stories bubble up that require us either to confirm them or knock them down. This happens on left and right, for example the Kerry mistress story and the Jeff Gannon story.
15. Some in the press say that blogs can't be trusted because the people who operate them are biased. Some bloggers would respond that by being up front about their biases, they are being more honest with their readers than their counterparts in the establishment press who keep their views hidden. Do you think that it is helpful for news consumers to be aware of the personal biases of those who present the news?
I don't hold the view that a blog or anybody else can't be trusted because of his or her point of view. The standard should be fairness and accuracy.
16. In your White House Notebook column "Making Hay Out of Straw Men" (1 June 2004), you make a little hay out of a straw man yourself. At the end of the piece, you quote President Bush as saying, "I'm honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein." You do not provide any further context. Taken by itself, the statement sounds absurd; how can the president shake the hand of someone whose hand was cut off? What you don't report is that the Iraqi had a robotic prosthetic hand that President Bush did indeed shake. But by omitting that information, the reader might walk away from your article thinking that President Bush's statement was either idiotic or insensitive, while in the proper context, the statement makes sense. Why did you choose to leave out the fuller context?
You should tell your readers that the story you're referring to is a "notebook" which has various unrelated items. The item about the amputee was unrelated to the "straw man" item. As for the item about the amputee, it said clearly that Bush was meeting Iraqi amputees. Seems to me you'd have to be a bit dense not to understand what Bush was saying.
How is someone supposed to know that President Bush is shaking the hand of an amputee who happens to have a prostetic hand when there is no mention of the prostethesis? Without that information, it sounds like President Bush is saying he's happy to be shaking the hand of someone who doesn't have one.
The quote you cited was from a recurring Salon.com feature called "Bushisms," the purpose of which is to call attention to President Bush's verbal miscues. In other words, Salon passed off the quote above as though President Bush had committed a gaffe. But the only way the reader would be left with that impression is by omitting the context, which is what Salon--and you--did.
17. In an interview with Brooke Gladstone on NPR (8 November 2002), you said that you "quite regularly" write articles that are "very favorable to the [Bush] White House point of view". What would you say is the most favorable article you've written about the Bush Administration, and why did you write it?
I think the best example is a profile I did of Andy Card, the chief of staff. His office called up asking how they could get reprints.
18. Before your interview with the hard-left website Daily Kos, as the interviewee solicited questions from the other readers of the site, she wrote: "[B]e kind to Dana. He's one of the good guys in the mainstream press." Why do you think a liberal partisan would refer to you as "one of the good guys"?
Actually the interview was conducted before the item was posted. I'm pleased the person who wrote that considered me a "good guy." If your readers go to that site, they'll find out the majority of the descriptions of me indicated I was a tool of the Republican establishment and a "whore" for Bush.
Well, you did take the time to respond to these questions, so I think at the very least you fall into the "not a bad guy" category.
Dana requested your thoughts on how the Washington Post could work with blogs--liberal and conservative--in order to serve their readers better: "Arranging virtual research communities? Rating blogs? Etc."
If you have any suggestions, please post them here.
Note: Just to prevent any confusion, what follows is addressed to you, the reader, and not to Dana Milbank in particular.
As a reader, I sometimes think I see bias in Dana Milbank's work. It could be an inaccurate perception; bias is in the eye of the beholder, and that eye can be fooled. I'm willing to believe I'm wrong.
The problem is, if significant segments of the population think you're biased, perception is what matters, not reality. In the establishment press, your credibility is locked up in portraying yourself as objective. Any perception of bias makes the claim of objectivity seem like a lie. If people think you're lying about that, they might not believe you even when you're giving them cold, hard facts.
Under the rules of the blogosphere, bias isn't a problem. Everyone's expected to have a bias, and it is our duty to broadcast that bias, because it helps readers understand when to view our claims with a little extra scrutiny.
As Mr. Milbank points out, just because you shun objectivity doesn't mean you dismiss objective fact. Fact and opinion can be commingled without killing anybody, so long as your facts are facts. But for years, the establishment media has been promising us that what they say is fact. And for years, they've been letting us down. From the Dateline NBC's bottle rockets under the gas tanks to Dan Rather's bogus memos, from the newspaper circulation scandals to the admitted cover-up of Saddam Hussein's atrocities, Big Media doesn't have much credibility left. So it's a little hard to believe that all the people who've been cutting corners in the mainstream press for non-political reasons wouldn't take similar liberties with the truth in their political coverage.
Perhaps there's much more that the blogosphere can learn from the establishment press than vice versa. But if there is one thing that the old media can learn from us, it's this: objective reporting, as it is known today, is dead. It's been dead for a long time, it's just getting harder to ignore the stench. The future lies in open source reporting, where we reveal as much of our thinking as we possibly can, and we let the world judge us on the merits of our claims.
You can be an honest liberal. You can be an honest moderate. And you can be an honest conservative. I think it's more honest to admit what you are then to cover it up. Objectivity doesn't make someone more honest, it just robs the news consumer of information that might be helpful in evaluating the statements made the reporter. In the world of open source information, one of the things that makes it open is knowing as much as you can about the source.
Objective reporting died because it requires objectivity at the individual level. But you see the world one way, I see it slightly differently, and frankly, I'm not so certain of myself that I'd stake my credibility on the world being exactly as I perceive it. If I say I'm an objective reporter, I'm claiming that I can distinguish between reality and my perception of it. I'm saying that I can tell you a story about an event significant enough to write about, and not a single word of what I say will be colored by my own thoughts on the topic. How can I make such a promise and honestly mean it?
Instead of requiring perfect objectivity from each individual, open source reporting allows distributed objectivity. I can post a message online, and if my bias goes overboard, someone else can point that out. The checks and balances are built-in, because rival bloggers have much more incentive to scrutinize their competitors than rival media outlets do. The establishment press club is too cozy. They can't police themselves. When you're living in a neighborhood of glass houses, nobody wants to be the first person to start a stone-throwing war. I've seen the blogosphere derided as a circle-jerk, but it's more like a circular firing squad. In a good way. The bullets chip away the falsehoods, leaving truth.
We bloggers make mistakes. Some bloggers are more committed to their ideology than the truth. Some prevaricate, some spin, and some lie. Just like in the establishment press. But out here online, the phonies get found out much faster than they do elsewhere. Each little website like mine is just a cell in the new digestive system of information called the blogosphere. I may be wrong sometimes, Glenn Reynolds may be wrong sometimes, Josh Marshall may be wrong sometimes, but together, all of us, no matter where we fall ideologically, have a very important role in steering the world as a whole towards the truth. One of us may get out of line periodically, but we're always being balanced out.
If Dana Milbank freed himself from the bondage of the unattainable ideal of objectivity and joined the blogosphere, he could help drive the national discussion in a more direct way, and I bet he'd have more fun. He asked how the Post could work with bloggers. Well, he was kind enough to participate in this discussion, so in a way, he and the Post already are working with bloggers. But why must the blogosphere remain completely separate from the establishment media? Why not experiment with blending the best of both? If the Post wants to learn about the blogosphere, what better way than starting a blog? Unleash Dana Milbank! Give him a co-branded website with a separate domain name, and let him say what he wants to say outside the artificial constraints of objectivity. But back it up with the kind of world-class organization that only exists in the establishment press. Become a hybrid.
Join us, Mr. Milbank. I think you'd like it over here.