RAIL

An interesting distinction is made by Andrew Cline in this recent post on his rhetoric and journalism blog, Rhetorica, between “punditry” and “opinion journalism”.

According to Cline, opinion journalism is reporting informed by or explicitly written from a particular political perspective.  It includes acting as a “custodian of fact” and observing a “discipline of verification”.  The offers this description of that discipline via a link to an older post:

A discipline of verification should be basic to any practice that we would understand as journalism. Practicing such a discipline means that journalists must be custodians of fact, i.e. journalists should get to the bottom of civic disputes by gathering and verifying facts rather than simply allowing interested sources to spout off. Journalists should protect the facts from those who would spin them, ignore them, or distort them. When journalists don’t practice this discipline, they are guilty of spinning, ignoring, and distorting, often in the name of fairness and balance.

As to being a custodian of fact, Cline has this to say in another older post on Rhetorica:

What I’m getting at here is this: facts are not necessarily easy things to nail down unless we’re measuring (and even then we can run into problems). […] There can be no argument over facts in themselves. We argue about how facts are measured and what facts mean. And we argue about assertions of fact until such assertions are established as fact. Reporters should consider the statements by sources as assertions of fact until such time as the reporter can establish them as facts. The news organization, then, should not publish unverified assertions without disclaimers or qualifiers.

In contrast to opinion journalism, according to Cline, punditry is simply about “winning politically” and does not include the imperatives to be a custodian of fact or to follow a discipline of verification.

While Cline says that winning politically is a legitimate goal (and I agree with him), I find the idea that punditry isn’t restricted by the kinds of obligations of veracity that opinion journalism is one that makes punditry an ethically troubled activity.  Is it acceptable for a pundit to lie if it advances his political agenda?  Is it acceptable for a pundit to engage in what Harry Frankfurt would call bullshit: simply speaking or writing without any regard for the truth or falsehood of what one says?  Certainly people do these things, but is it any defense for a Bill O’Reilly or a Michael Moore to say in response to criticisms that they’ve not been true to the facts, “Well look, I’m a pundit.  You can’t hold me to facts when I’m only trying to make political points here.”?

If this is what punditry is then I don’t think we should tolerate it.  Rhetoric, a friend in the field once told me, is the art of making the truth apparent.  If she was right about this then it is a mistake to say that what pundits traffic in is rhetoric.  It mimes rhetoric, using the techniques of effective communication in an unethical caricature of legitimate persuasion. That’s maybe a little esoteric as an objection, but I think it matters–if this is the example that people have of rhetoric, then their opinions of the subject will be informed by it.  Hence the bad image of rhetoric as a “win at any cost” bag of tricks that has been perpetuated since Plato will persist, with all its stultifying effects.

Quite apart from its effect on rhetoric however, I think punditry also does society a serious disservice by making “deep disagreements” deeper still. To be clear, I’m not bemoaning division itself (which I regard as inevitable in any polity made up of actual humans) or saying that the choices between the political positions the pundits represent are only apparent choices. There are serious political and cultural differences that call for respect and careful thought.  There are hard decisions to make between incompatible alternatives on a number of important issues. The choices we face are real ones.  The problem is that punditry, as defined here, doesn’t help us make those choices at all.  It offers only the sort of unrestrained and unprincipled discourse that makes those choices harder by shrouding them in a fog of spurious debate.  Opinion journalism, by contrast, does the real work.  It is olympic wrestling compared to the “professional wrestling” of punditry.

It is by its unrestricted nature that punditry debases the coin of political discourse. People follow the example their pundits set. Even when they don’t they often have to deal with the pundit’s mode of political discussion anyway, because of the pervasive effects of the (pundit-heavy, opinion journalism-light) media in setting the tone of discussion around the issues we confront.  The unschooled can only take away the lesson that all one needs to be a competent participant in public discourse is a strong opinion or a set of talking points that advances the cause of one’s party.  Those with a more nuanced understanding of public discourse either find themselves shouted down or dragged to the pundit’s level.  The only alternative is to walk away in disgust, and the stakes are rather too high for that.

Opinion journalism, with its concern for fact and verification seems to offer something better.  It is realistic about the fact that people write from a particular perspective, but ethical in the sense that it obliges the writer or the speaker to stay true to the facts.  With opinion journalism, the argument that the facts support one’s point of view is a serious argument and one worth making.  With punditry there are no facts, just “facts”, and so that argument could never be anything more than a cheap burden-shifting move.

The idea that the facts matter is an important one.  Deliberation without facts is doomed.  It matters a great deal whether or not global climate change is actually happening and whether or not human activity is playing a causal role, for example.  The facts of the case, as best as we can understand them at this point in time given the evidence we have, sets the horizon of what counts as a sensible alternative for dealing with the problem. Deliberation about climate change that offers only partisan construals of the situation offer only ethos-based arguments (“Climate change is a hoax because Al Gore is a liar.”) or pathos-based arguments (“Look at this poor polar bear floating away on a bit of melting iceberg! How can you deny climate change is happening?”) where what is really needed are logos-based ones (i.e. ones about actual scientific data).

If facts matter and pundits are exempt from concern with them, then punditry is huge political disservice.  Opinion journalism, by contrast, is something we should fight to recover.  If the post from Rhetorica does nothing else, it makes a step in the right direction by suggesting a way of drawing a distinction between the two.