SHOULD JOURNALIST VOTE?

Should journalists vote?
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By Howie Severino

Election day is one of the busiest for journalists. Amid all that activity, how do they find time to vote? Well, as I discovered through my own personal polling method ("chika pulse"), many of my colleagues end up not voting at all.

This leads me to make an unoriginal proposal – if journalists are not going to have time to vote anyway, why not make that a principled omission rather than the result of a scheduling problem? In other words, journalists can refrain from voting as a statement of nonpartisanship and devotion to unbiased reporting.

After all, voting is a partisan act -- albeit a private one -- while we journalists reflexively promise nonpartisanship in our election coverage ("Walang kinikilingan" chorva). If we can make a commitment to a candidate in the voting booth, what assurances can we give our public that we have been fair and unbiased in our coverage? Would it not be natural for us to wish our chosen ones to emerge victorious? Wouldn't that private wish tend to influence, even subliminally, the way we angle a story, especially about those choices and their opponents?
As for the line about journalists being citizens too with a duty to vote, that act may conflict, for the reasons I just mentioned, with our other civic duty on that day to cover and report the election without fear or favor. Since only journalists are tasked with that responsibility, shouldn't that duty reign supreme on election day

As I said, this idea did not originate with me, but with the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, Leonard Downie, who directs news coverage in the capital of the world's hyperpower. The weight of that responsibility must have caused not a little soul-searching on his part about how to protect and enhance his newspaper's credibility, in an age when the mainstream media's readership and authority are being eroded by charges of bias. Downie wrote in a famous essay in the op-ed section of his newspaper:

"I no longer exercise my right to vote. As the final decision-maker on news coverage in The Post, I refuse to decide, even privately, which candidate should be president or a member of the city council or what policies should be set for health care or taxes. I want my mind to remain open to all sides and possibilities as I supervise our coverage."

Most journalists queried whether their voting preferences affect their coverage will of course be quick to deny it, as Jiggy Manicad and Maki Pulido did when I asked them that question on Sine Totoo last Saturday night. But in a political environment like ours where almost everyone's integrity is suspect, including journalists', perhaps we should consider extraordinary steps to ensure that we can be trusted.

Some journalists, of course, came out publicly to disagree with Downie's argument for non-voting journalists. The respected pundit Michael Kinsley even called it "lunatic". From an essay in Slate, I quote Kinsley:

"(Downie) is buying into the fallacy that having an opinion is the same as having a bias.
What's the difference? Bias is a failure to suppress your opinions or (if opinion is in your job description) to state and defend your opinions openly. Like avoiding opinions, avoiding all bias is probably impossible.. .

So perfect objectivity is not just unachievable but indefinable. That doesn't make it a false ideal. Avoiding bias is a more reasonable aspiration than avoiding opinion itself. If you reject the Downie Solution, though, you'd better have an alternative way to demonstrate your lack of bias. Fortunately, the burgeoning field of journalistic ethics has an all-purpose alternative solution for almost all ethical dilemmas. It is disclosure. Let your readers know that your great-aunt's ex-husband owns 10 shares of AT&T, and they can decide for themselves whether this biases your coverage of the telecommunicationsi ndustry.

Why shouldn't the same logic apply to politics? If you're not going to refrain from voting, why not let your readers know how you voted so they can judge your objectivity for themselves? If you're asking them to trust you despite your political opinions, shouldn't they know what those opinions are? If you believe you do an adequate job of preventing your opinions from curdling into bias, what are you afraid of?"

So that is Kinsley's counter-proposal: a voting disclosure policy requiring journalists to inform the public whom they voted for, so that viewers, readers and listeners can decide for themselves whether the reporters they rely on for their news have been too biased to be trusted.

Check out Howie's blog: http://www.gmapinoy tv.com/sidetrip/ blog/