Last year when the election was hot, I made an argument that John McCain has done more for bipartisanship than Obama.  Written as a facebook comment, this prompted fiery attacks from my liberal friends (mostly Obama-mad Californians) saying, no, McCain is terrible because he’s Republican and Obama is the true bipartisan actor because he promises to bridge the divide.

Hello?  Do people see what is wrong with this argument?  I will explain.

My argument was based on the fact that McCain has actually “reached across the aisle” in the past by sponsoring bipartisan legislation, such as the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act of 2005. He has actually worked with Democrats.  He has actually supported legislation that many people would (gasp) consider more “left” than what is conventionally “right.”

McCain, I would argue, is generally seen, by both Republicans and Democrats, as a moderate Republican.  That’s why the really right-wing Republicans I know hate him, because he does not stand for “true” conservative values.  My own impression is he is not as right-wing as the average Republican.

But many liberals still hate him because – well, he is a Republican.

Which gets back to my original point.   Those who were arguing with me were arguing because they couldn’t stand that I was saying anything good about McCain, because he is Republican, and therefore automatically bad in all that he stands for.

Their argument was against Republicanism, not for bipartisanship.

This is exactly the kind of attitude that is counterproductive to developing bipartisan dialogue, and which is getting Obama so much scrutiny now on his promises for bridging the divide.

Most liberals don’t want to bridge the divide.  They want to promote the liberal agenda.  They think the liberal agenda is what is all-good.  They’re not open or interested in considering the ideas of the other side.

I would argue that most liberals, and most Americans, don’t know what bipartisanship means.

Bipartisanship, in my mind, means, well, an openness to actually thinking about the ideas – and perhaps more importantly, the people – on the other side of politics.  To consider what they are saying, to respect them as people, and to engage them in dialogue.

It means not discounting people who think differently from you as stupid, misguided, ignorant.

People have reasons for believing what they do.

If we’re truly to bridge the bipartisan divide in America, we have to start talking to each other.

Maybe the problem is that people don’t understand why it is important and necessary to start talking across the political divide.  Why is it important, you might ask as a liberal, to give one hoot of a consideration to what conservatives think?

On one level – perhaps too idealistic for politics – it’s for truth.  There was a belief when newspapers were formed in the early 19th century that, if we just have everybody discuss everything in an open dialogue, the truth will emerge.  I hold to that belief, even if there have been barriers to that being achieved, often.

Every side has something valuable to contribute.  That’s not to say every side is right.  But in my experience, every side of an argument, in general has some point.  If we block them out because we disagree with their overall argument, you miss those pearls that are present.

But on a more practical level, we are, after all, one country, and to do anything we need to engage people from all different points of view.  There needs to be discussion amongst the various sides.  Unless you want politics to be a tug of war, with whichever side happens to have more power at the time winning.

How is that the building of a nation?  It’s just a childish game of power.

I won’t go into how wonderful William Cronon is for now, but it is in a city like Madison, uber liberal but situated in the mixed political heartland, that his gems of wisdom on bipartisanship have been thought out.

So what’s more important, fighting for your beliefs, or understanding others’?  Does one necessarily impede the other?  I’d like to think that they help each other.  Or rather, understanding of others’ views helps you achieve a more accurate truth, and it is based on this truth that the best beliefs are ultimately founded, and it is based on truth that we can best make a better world.

My previous posts about the bipartisan divide:

The Bipartisan Divide

Obama and Bipartisanship: What I’m Talking About

Bipartisan Dialogue

Note: I’m focusing on liberals for their lack of understanding of bipartisanship because they are who I associate with most.  I’m not saying conservatives don’t share this lack of understanding as well – I just don’t know as much about how they think.  I’m also not saying I’m on one side or the other.  After all, my point is about the bipartisanship.

It’s a degrading task, posting flyers, though perhaps not as degrading as the process that begins after the ads of actually interacting with people and trying to sell them something they have too many options for already (again, say, hypothetically an apartment). It’s physical work which requires trekking miles through odd paths and buildings, up and down giant flights of fancy university stairways, sometimes fearing you’ve gone where you’re not supposed to go. Sometimes, you go anyway. But what I didn’t know until this week was that they, flyers, work. (Another post forthcoming on the implications I see for advertising.)

Among the most formidable competitors for space that I’ve seen, over and over, and over, which I remember best for some reason – perhaps because it’s most omnipresent, or because it’s so visually simple – has been one titled “Editor,” in large black letters, Times New Roman font or the like, on white paper, sometimes with text underneath – on the latter point I never really took much note.  I thought it would be a grad student or something seeking some extra dough.

Today I was scoping out a less crowded board and saw a space under an “Editor” flyer, when I started reading it. I won’t post the name of the “editor” but what the flyer lists is this:

Have your essay, paper, or thesis/dissertation edited at reasonable rates.

*Columbia MFA graduate

*Published writer [fiction and nonfiction]

*Former editor at Fortune Magazine

*Experienced editor/university level [7 years]

*ESL experienced editor

At the third bullet point I paused and had one of those moments that have recurred so many times: What is going on in the world?? A former of editor of Fortune Magazine is advertising their flyers next to mine.

desperate? or just really, really smart? (again, wait for my forthcoming post about how flyer advertising works) it’s possible he actually hired a flyering agency (come to think about it again, very possible/probable), not that he trekked the university himself with the hundreds of sheets and tape. Right?

Or maybe, to make sense of this, instead of speaking to the dire state of the traditional journalism/publishing industry, maybe this is simply an example of the egalitarian market – all are competing for the money of the people, and hence for the same attention for your ads. Maybe this lesson is more about laissez-fair capitalism than about falling traditional industries. I hope. I hope the same capitalistic markets can lift our own industry back up.

(Or, maybe he is exaggerating and was not that significant of an editor at Fortune Magazine. which…kind of appears to be the case after I went on his website. so perhaps I was fooled, jumped to conclusions too soon. Ah, but no more than an interesting thought exercise then.)

Before I even sit down, he asks, how do you decide what to highlight?

Oh… Um. I don’t know.

Well, I’m just curious because I wrote it, he said, how you decide what sentences to highlight and what not to.

Well. Nobody has ever asked me that before. So partly because of that and partly because I was a bit out of it (and in retrospect, maybe also because Overbye has an interesting manner of communication), I got flustered, fumbled for words, and finally told him I don’t really have a set methodology for deciding what to highlight… pause. Maybe I do this… maybe I do that… pause… I close the copy of my reading, hoping I hadn’t written anything offensive on the margins in there that he might have seen , and tell him, hmm. I haven’t really thought about it before, I’ll have to get back to you.

In class. He talks about his life. He talks about science writing. And then there’s a fascinating class discussion about the future of journalism (this is the second or third time our class has gotten into this discussion) which starts with him asking us if we would pay to read the New York Times.  I don’t know how to refer to, or if it is even possible to save, twitter feeds, so here is what I tweeted immediately afterwards (uh, somehow WordPress added in the numbers):

1. Class discussion about journalism’s future with guest speaker Dennis Overbye. He asks would we pay for the NYTimes. Many say yes.
2. One student says all nwspprs have to start charging people at same time. Overbye says antitrust. I agree: that’s a cartel =bad 4 the people!
3. Another student suggests Google’s model of personalization. “Interactive personalized experience”
4. Debate over value of most emailed list: news the public “should have” vs wants. Many defend j’s public service goal, against celebrity news.
5. I defend what public wants – important to respect/value it if you are going to be a successful business! My opinion, must consider both.

That’s probably the main gist of it.  I mentioned at the very end of the discussion that I’d like to try to propose a AAAS 2010 panel on new/online/social media for science journalism.  Overbye asks where the AAAS conference is going to be, and I tell him San Diego.  That’s the same place he first interviewed, for two full weeks, Allan Sandage, the hero of Overbye’s book and latter-half-of-20th-century hero of the cosmological world, whom we had just read about. Hm.

For those fledgling young science writers who are still trying to figure all of it out, it might be comforting (or not) to hear Overbye  say, regarding how to build a relationship with your profile source, “I’m not good at this kind of thing.”  That’s the guy who wrote the critically acclaimed book about arguably the most seminal cosmologist of the past sixty years.

So, how did he do it? “I’m not very smooth but I just keep at it until everybody gets tired.”

Ok, this one might be a bit more inspiring “I was persistent and kept coming back, and he [Sandage] just kept showing up.”

And on writing a book, which I think could also apply to certain times in life, and which seemed to fit our day’s theme of cosmology: It’s lonely, he said, and once you’ve been doing it for several years, not having your byline appear once, “You wonder whether anybody even remembers who you are.”

The media industry is changing dramatically, and journos are rapidly getting into online media. Last month Science Writers of New York held a great panel on social media for science writers, which converted me But I suppose my own latest inspiration comes from attending the Media Coverage of Climate Change panel at AAAS this year, which I felt presented many of the same points as what I’ve heard at previous “communicating science”/”media coverage of science” AAAS panels – except with the added point of “but the news industry is in a really bad state…so things are really bad.” People did also talk about how science journalism is one of the first things to be cut, at least at non-science news organizations often. Nobody seemed really to offer a way forward, which was depressing.

I think it would be awesome if we could explore non-conventional ways of communicating about science to the public – which I think is one of the most fundamental goals of probably most science journalists, as well as one of many scientists. Those ways, I imagine, could mean anything from traditional news and science organizations adopting multimedia and social media… to new internet science communication ventures starting up (along the lines of http://Spot.us, which is not about science) (and on Sunday a couple of classmates and I talked with Mike Lemonick, who told us of his new nonprofit climate change communcation-focused media organization http://climatecentral.org/ – these are just examples – but I need to do more research).

We’ve thrown out a couple of ideas, one of which was to try to find people who have done research on the topic. I suppose the discussion does not have to be focused on science communication – but if it is, it would be better, of course, because it will be AAAS. Other ideas were to invite media expert people or people from scientific organizations that have done innovative online communications stuff (e.g. NSF’s yet-to-launch www.science360.gov site which will be a “multimedia portal” for all things science).

Any ideas for resources for probing deeper into this subject, potential people who might be helpful for this venture, ideas for the panel itself, or if you have any interest in joining in on possibly assembling such a project, I would very much appreciate your input! Thanks!

Follow the budding discussion via my twitter profile if you’re interested @anniejourno (and a new group convo! @newscij)

Update: A number of people have expressed interest in the idea individually.  We will be starting a group discussion soon via email.  Please contact me if you would like to be added.

Note: this message is adapted from an email I sent a University of Wisconsin researcher to ask about resources. The following paragraph was taken out from above, but here it is, in case anybody is interested in seeing my inquiry about finding research in particular (specifically at the University of Wisconsin in this email):

On the topic of research, I wanted to ask you if you knew of any people at University of Wisconsin who have looked at new/social/online media for communicating science in particular. I ask because I know you (the JComm and life sciences comm departments, if not others as well) have done a lot of research on science communication, and I have also gotten a couple of glimpses of JComm faculty blogging/teaching (and perhaps also a conference at the school?) about online media. So I was wondering if there was any chance researchers at UW have combined the two.

Those are only some of the highlights from my weekend at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2008 annual meeting in Chicago. In no way can I capture it all in one short post, so I will write about it one day at a time, in what will still be a very limited account of all the terrificness that is the AAAS annual meeting.

Here’s Thursday.

I step out of the subway at the Washington station in Chicago’s downtown to see a flock of pigeons gathered in reverent assembly around a small fire in the ground. They’re just standing, some with feathers puffed. Chicago feels colder than New York had been, but my friend will inform me later in the day that it had been quite warm the day before there too. But today it’s cold, and like humans, the pigeons gravitate towards the warmth. I wonder, what would the world be like if pigeons had discovered fire? Off from the pack, a male is seriously chasing and pecking at a female who clearly does not want to be chased and pecked at by him; both are walking very quickly, and occasionally she flies off and he follows. I consider trying to shoo, or kick, the male, but decide that wouldn’t be very nice.

At the Hyatt where the conference is, I attend an hour or two of the latter half of a communicating science workshop for scientists. They had formed groups of about eight, and each group had videotaped one person talking about their research. Now they are recapping. It amuses and strikes me how nervous most of them say they had been while being taped, and it is interesting to me how our different professions, science and journalism, influence our communication styles and, in a way, dispositions.

I randomly meet an NSF communications person for whom I had written two articles before as part of a collaboration between an NSF lab where I interned and Livescience.com. Then I meet the NSF communications director, who informs me that NSF is interested in getting video on NSF-funded research. I tell her I’m interested in doing video (which is true), and she seems excited. Wow, great prospects, eh? Not bad for networking in a short afternoon ;-P

At Brent House at the University of Chicago, where I will be staying tonight, I meet my good friend from college for the first time in two and half years. Their house is hosting a dinner with John Polkinghorne, a renowned science and religion figure who is both a physicist and theologian. Brent House is the house of the Episcopal Ministry on campus. My friend, her boyfriend, and I get into a heated debate about whether people are machines. I argue yes, but they don’t like the idea, and I counter that I believe many non-scientists misunderstand what science does and means: just because science says we are machines, does not mean we are not human beings as agents too. We come to something of an agreement on the real danger of science being misapplied by people to form false conclusions about human nature and about the way people should live, translating limited-scope assumption-based descriptions into overarching prescriptions. Social Darwinism, for example, or the assumption in economics that people always act in their own self-interest. (I can expand on this idea of the misuse of science in philosophies of life in a separate post.)

It’s Darwin’s 200th birthday, and Lincoln’s as well today. John Polkinghorne is giving a talk on “The Friendship of Science and Religion” on campus. He is in Chicago for the AAAS meeting and will be speaking at a similar event there. Since he’s famous, I decide to videotape it and I quickly learn (first video experience lesson) that it is hard to focus on what someone is saying when you are adjusting camera settings and getting super tired because you don’t have a tripod. But I gathered his main point: science and religion are and should be friends. I’ll post the talk (and watch it again) later. (I will write a separate post on science and religion too later.)

The questions following the Polkinghorne talk are brilliant, and at least 30 people line up after the talk to talk to the guy. I had heard that UChicago was a very intellectual university, and one essay I had read from there and one fellow jschooler I know from there both supported that generalization. But now I saw it in action, or rather, in their riveting discourse. That’s not even to mention that the campus is clean and pretty and exudes scholarliness, and the people are really, really nice. (I won’t say what I am contrasting this with! ) I marvel again at the wonderfulness that is Midwestern intellectualism, provide a mental nod to the University of Wisconsin, and think, I could come here in the future for my PhD.

I am in the midst of fully reading a special report that I discovered last summer, by IEEE Spectrum on: the singularity. It’s fascinating, but somehow it doesn’t exactly give a definition of what the singularity is, so I’m left wondering whether it is 1) the idea that we are going to be able to upload are consciousnesses into computers, an idea that the scijourno John Horgan who wrote the intro article says too many people wrongly think will come soon; but which, for some reason, Horgan still focuses his article on (who knows, maybe because that is what’s going to pull readers in – for the same reason it has gotten so much attention despite being scientifically unsound. The fact that it will happen soon is what’s scientifically unsound, he says… not necessarily the fact that it can happen at all).

Or the singularity is 2) this notion that I’m really really interested in and am going to write my first story pitch for my Science Reporting class about – related to the relationship between mind and brain, namely, how does the brain give rise to the mind? the nature of consciousness… whether a computer model of the brain can essentially, one day perhaps, be a mind… You can extrapolate that into the world of artificial intelligence and “alive,” or conscious, robots – but that stuff I’m not so much interested in, as much as simply understanding the interconnection between the physical brain and the thinking? conscious? brain. I am only interested in those machine-life-form themes because they can provide a lens through which we can understand our own consciousness – artificial intelligence is, to me, a thought experiment, through which we can visualize consciousness.

So, the whole thing is amazing. But Horgan’s article is also depressing, because its main point, perhaps, is that we understand so little of the brain. And we are far too far away from the point where we might be able to upload our consciousnesses. (Again, I’m confused about why he fixates on this point in the article, since that is not the point that I personally find most interesting; it’s kind of fringe thinking, which doesn’t really have real relevance today, because it isn’t scientifically based. So why keep coming back to it? And center the entire special report on it? Just to give a reference point against which to discuss the actual science?)

It’s disappointing that we understand so little of the brain because that means I can’t come up with a story that says, wow! we’re almost there! It essentially means we are not at a point where we understand how, and why, the brain gives rise to the mind… we are far, far away from understanding consciousness. That’s sad, not just because I can’t come up with easy “breakthrough!” story ideas then, but also because, well, we know so little.

I guess my next task can be to look at what developments have occurred since last summer. Any solid steps would be good for stories, even if they’re not about humans having accomplished the entire, vast, grand feat. Those steps would also be good, not just for scijournos, of course, but for science….for humanity…for the furtherance of knowledge.

Check out this amusing bit: Who’s who?

So. What’s new with me? Here’s my latest discovery, about which I am super excited.

I’ve become a new media / social media / all online media convert since I last wrote on this blog. Two weeks ago I went to an amazing event sponsored by Science Writers of New York, called Social Media for Science Writers. By it, I was inspired to join Twitter (follow me: anniejourno), but more than that, I got inducted into the new media mindframe. (I only loathe to call it new media, so try to come up with a different term, because that is what Columbia calls it, except they are only referring to multimedia production, which is not remotely everything that new media is, as I’ve discovered. They are backward, farrr behind what is newest, I’ve now realized.) After my new indoctrination and induction into Twitter world, I also joined Delicious and am now, this week, going to be creating my own personal-professional website.

The newest amazing discovery I’ve made is something called Spot.us, an entirely new model for organizing and funding journalism. Essentially, anybody can submit story tips, reporters submit story pitches along with what they’d like to be paid for a given story, and people who want to see that story written can contribute money towards it. (See Spot.us’s founder’s blog and the LATimes’ review of the venture.) It’s beautiful because it uses what can only be done on the internet to lead to what is potentially a real, business-successful new, news model.

That’s what many people don’t realize, that even though the internet is destroying our industry (journalism) and, on an even broader level, deconstructing many of the old cultural practices and values of society – that it also provides unprecedented, and in many ways boundless, opportunities. I’m not an expert, so don’t expect me to go articulating all of those opporutunties here but two I can think of just based on my watching all this is first, anybody can start any venture for practically no money, just in the form of a simple website. The other is the endless opportunities for person-to-person, pretty much horizontal connection-making – I guess what is called social media or social networking. An early news 2.0 feature that I was, and am still, fascinated by is comment features on webpages. Basically, anybody can now respond to an article written by a real journalist. Think about the equalizing potential! It’s the new and real democracy. Or real communism

Sure, the challenges are, as they always say, “monetizing” all that happens on the internet. That’s for our industry, I’m talking about, as well as, I am sure, many others. (EX. One of the most basic, and classic, problems is this – things on the webternet are well, free, so news is gonna be too, so how can you get paid? Journos like lamenting the financial crash of their industry… up until a couple years ago they were really just saying it was dying, but now it appears many, or at least some, are figuring out, even if slowly, how to adapt.)

But I myself have tremendous faith that the opportunities that the internet provides can translate into something not only not inferior, but maybe even far grander, than the conventional ways our last century provided. I don’t exactly have the answer to how that can be done. But new ventures like Spot.us are what give me hope.

Overall this blog (referring to old blog) remains a venue for me to document my experiences and ponderings on my journey towards becoming a science and environmental journalist. (See my About (old blog’s “About”) for a more lengthy description*.)

Apologies to my readers for the month and a half during which this blog (old blog) was on hiatus from public view. But now, it is back. Welcome again, or welcome anew! I hope you enjoy.

*(It’s unclear as of yet whether I will keep this new blog on the same topics as my old blog was about. We’ll see )

reflections

new york sometimes reminds me of a movie i watched while sitting in on a class that a friend in college was teaching to teenagers. at the end of the film, Empire of the Sun, i remember saying one thing, it doesn’t seem believable to me. is this realistic? i don’t think these human behaviors seem realistic. a child of nine was wandering alone in the streets, and nobody paid him any attention. wouldn’t someone give some concern to a little boy who was alone in a war? my friend said, are you kidding me? this is how people behave in the middle of a war zone. it was 1941 in shanghai.

if there’s any place that’s like a war zone always, it’s new york city. a friend from high school, still living in boston, was visiting briefly last week. instead of parking on my street, like the most sensible thing would have been to do, she decided to park in the bronx. yeahhh. she did it because there was a metro north station with overnight parking there and it would have been easier to leave the city from there… though it was at least an hour by subway to my house. and it was in the bronx. i guess she didn’t quite know what ‘the bronx’ meant, i.e. she didn’t know what to expect from it. but oh well. anyway, so she and her brother ended up spending a (relatively) significant amount of time in the bronx and on the subway that goes there. later, my friend, who is going into psychology, commented to me that there are so many people in new york who are so obviously mentally ill and aren’t getting the help they need. walk through penn station any night after midnight, and you see how she’s right: you start feeling like you’re in the kind of world you’d only expect to see in a war zone.

it’s not just late night in the train stations, of course, it’s everywhere, all the time. any subway line, subway station, street.

maybe it is really any city, not just NY, that is such, filled with poor and deranged people – too troubling for my sheltered suburb-bred mind. but some aspects are definitely special to new york – there may be poor people in every city, but only in new york is the contrast so jarring, because here you see the mixture of rich and poor, in geographic proximity, and you starkly see the degree/extremity of poverty and wealth. and there’s also the sheer number of poor. and probably made more real to me at the moment by the fact that i live amongst them in my shitty neighborhood.

two of the lines that run through richest new york both continue to the poorest regions. gosh, how many times do you get in a subway car and face the unbearable stink – of a homeless person sleeping, or just – there?

Continued writing today

I wrote about this anguish of New York last fall when I lived here then, I lived in Elmhurst, Queens, also a poor, crappy neighborhood.

Last fall, I think I developed some sort of anxiety problem. But now after being here for a more extended time this fall, I am being to truly feel the pervasiveness of the “each man for himself,” dog-eat-dog, jungle mentality of the city. Nobody gives a hoot about each other, and everything is so competitive, you have no room to fail, no room for weakness. Why are there, who knows, thousands of mentally ill people roaming the streets in plain view of everybody, and nobody, nobody is doing anything to help them?

At least my conscience is clean. Unlike those ibankers whose entire goal in life is to make money for themselves.

But why is the city so ineffective at handling these people? There’s a severe lack of mental health services, and I noticed this beginning with my own experience last fall when I did not have health insurance or money, and had to wait a month (or more?) to get just one clinic appointment, and then had to have paystubs (which I did not have, because I was not getting paid by my internship, and my wealthy employer who was hiring me under the table as a nanny did not want to have any kind of paper record of the job) to get the sliding scale rate, which I did not end up getting. And how many people in New York don’t have health insurance? It’s REALLY STUPID, if you ask me. Anyone thinking about it should realize this is NOT a civilized country. At least, it’s not a civilized city.

The Implicit Association Test has been used by social scientists widely to make the point that people are very often biased when – and in ways that – they do not know they are.

Personally, I’ve kind of held this as a truth. But it’s not just because they tell me so. I know from my own experiences growing up in New England and then going to school in California that people can have ways of thinking about race that are biased without knowing it. Specifically, living in California for a few years made me realize how…much more forward people in California, or at least the Bay Area, are in their thinking about race. So thus I realized how unenlightened my own thinking had been back when I lived in Massachusetts. After my own views on race changed, I realized how they had been.

The past few months in J-school I’ve been rather obsessed with the notion of being honest, at least to yourself, about your own biases. Perhaps it started with a lecture by one of the people who I would love to be, Shankar Vedantam, science reporter / behavior columnist for the Washington Post. In August he gave our full class a lecture about bias in which he went through a plethora of studies demonstrating that we are biased in ways that we don’t know, that is, people have unconscious biases.

I totally agreed with him. And while this was not new to me, I felt it was probably new to many of my classmates, so I was adamantly happy that they had brought this guy to lecture to us. Afterwards, I was so excited I thought about doing my master’s project on a related topic, and told him so when I went up to introduce myself and ask him a barrage of (what I thought were pretty good) questions.

(WHY was I so excited to hear his talk? It is a bit hard to think back to my mindset of the time, to be honest… I do think there were specific events in the past couple of years that have led me to feel so strongly about this topic. Maybe it is related to why I am such a strong supporter of bipartisan dialogue. Hmmm. Let me think about it some more.)

Then in my Reporting and Writing 1 class, several discussions have brought up the idea of what to do with your biases as a reporter.
1. As a journalist, we learned during a discussion one day in Reporting and Writing I, we are not supposed to publicly demonstrate any political favoritism, whether clearly for a political party or on any issue that is controversial. (The line on what is considered a political/controversial issue gets murky, when you wonder, hmmm, can you donate to a nature group, can you go to an anti-sweatshop rally. But the rule is there and is rigorous.) You definitely cannot take sides on any issue that you are covering. But for most journalists, and their news organizations, it is much more serious, and deeper than that. Many news organizations will prohibit its employees from giving campaign contributions. My professor, who is more ethical on many issues than the average journalist, says that her husband is an Obama supporter and put an Obama bumper sticker on their car. But she as a journalist could not be driving around with that. So they got a magnetic Obama bumper sticker that she could take off the care when she drove, and he could put back on when he drove. Leonard Downey, former executive editor of the Washington Post, said the only political activities that journalists can participate in is vote. I have read that some journalists don’t even do that: They forsake their rights as a citizen for their calling as a journalist.

I was fortunate enough to see this ethic in

What is the reason for this almost superhuman ethic that we must follow?

Our adjunct professor talked a bunch about how it helps up maintain our credibility and protects us against attacks of being biased.

But our main professor said (when I asked) that it was more than that. There is something about publicly withholding your opinions that actually makes you (have to) be more truly open-minded to the other side, she said.

I have strongly embraced this code of journalistic conduct and prided myself on it. (Ok, now thinking about it, I do actually think this is strongly related to why I am a big fan of bipartisan dialogue. I’ll similarly pride myself on my support for and understanding of the importance of bipartisan dialogue, that I am genuinely interested in how Republicans think and am not super-partisan (ok, this sentence shows that I am obviously partisan at base, but I have been proud to come to the realization that I am not absolutely right in my partisan views, that they come from my background, where I’ve lived, the crowds I’ve been in; that I am genuinely interested in hearing and understanding the “other side”)).

So I’ve had kind of an attitude of superiority, at least in my head, towards all this.

2. A classmate turned up a story around October about a Harlem guy who combined dealing marijuana with advocating support for Obama. We went through a whole class discussion about a dilemma she had (unrelated to bias; it had to do with protecting your sources, how what we do can harm them, etc., and whatnot). But another thing that came up was how part of why she felt uncomfortable about publishing the story was because he’s an Obama supporter – though not affiliated with his official campaign – and she, too, supports Obama.

At this point, another classmate seemed to have some sort of ephiphany. She said she realized that if she were faced with such a story, she would jump on it if it were a McCain supporter, whereas she would really not be able to write the story if it was an Obama guy like this guy. This seemed to be the first time that this realization about herself and how her biases would come into play, occurred to her.

And there I was sitting on my high horse (I guess I can call it that even though this is really not a prevalent/important “moral” value anywhere except in my own head; and I guess in journalism), lauding myself for my long-time understanding of the principle that people are all biased and that our unconscious biases will inevitably affect our work.

I had been in other class discussions before where I got really annoyed when one girl gave a really canned response about how “the New York Times isn’t liberal; only it’s editorial page is liberal, but not its news section” – in response to my statement that the New York Times is liberal – as part of a Critical Issues in Journalism discussion about what news media lean politically which way. At that point I felt it was so obvious that the reason people did not see the New York Times as liberal was because they are liberals. (Whereas conservative people I’ve interacted with clearly think the NYT is liberal.)

But this day in RW1, a third classmate made a statement akin to “everybody always thinks they can keep their biases out of their writing, but this is a perfect example of how it does affect our work.” I thought, yes! People in my Critical Issues class always seemed to talk about how we can just keep our biases out of our work – to which I think in response, that’s BS, they will infiltrate your work even if you don’t do it consciously. So what this third RW1 classmate said was, to me, exactly what I believed, and I am so glad he could acknowledge it to all of us.

This is all just to say that I have been super keen on the notion that (1) people have unconscious biases, and (2) as journalists, they will affect us in our work, and the best way to start to getting past our biases is, first, to acknowledge that we have them.

3. A guest lecturer spoke to use about race. (I think she’s a TV/documentary professor or something at the J-school.) She was black, and she has been our only black guest lecturer, and, interestingly enough, perhaps the only one who was not a New York Times staff writer (we have had like 10).

In that discussion, a couple of comments were thrown around between her and one or two other students about how “everybody’s racist,” and that one student agreed at least. But we didn’t quite get INTO it. On the other side of the room, how this all came up was, another student was talking about how bad he would feel writing about somebody being racist, even if the person had admitted it themselves. I asked him what was different about writing that than from writing about anything else that was bad about a person. A second classmate chimed in and said, there’s this feeling in America that being racist is unforgivable. He’s the one who agreed when the lecturer made the aside comment that everybody’s racist. I thought, hmmm, that’s interesting. Perhaps I have been so conscious of my own unconscious biases for so long that it no longer strikes me as “bad” have such biases; and I am totally out of touch with how most people think, and completely within my own head.

Can we think we’re more biased than we actually are?

Is there harm to thinking of oneself as biased?
Would it make you more biased?
Is it ok if you are right, but harmful if you think you’re more biased than you

Can there be value to ignoring – and even suppressing – your own biases after all?

actually are?