Bloggasm

Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker essayist and author of the book The Tipping Point, has a wonderful essay on his website about possible conflicts of interests for journalists and how he confronts and works with these conflicts of interest. An excerpt from his opening paragraphs:

As a writer I wear two hats. I am a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, where I have been under contract more or less continuously since 1996. I also do public speaking, based on my second career as the author of two books—The Tipping Point and Blink. Over the past four or five years, I have given talks to corporations, trade associations, conventions of one sort or another, colleges, think tanks, charitable groups, public lecture series and, on one occasion (arranged by my mother) my old high school. For some of those engagements, I have been paid. For those given to academic and charitable organizations, I generally have not.

Most of the time, these two hats complement each other. It was because of my work as a New Yorker writer that I was able to get a contract to write my books. It is because of my books that I have gotten speaking engagements, and it is, in part, because of my books and my speaking that some people have discovered me in the New Yorker. But I recognize that there is also the possibility that these two roles can come into conflict, as is always the case when someone has to serve two different constituencies. This note is an attempt to talk about that possibility, and to think through its implications. I will warn you that what follows is quite long. It is long because the question of potential conflicts of interest is a fraught and difficult subject for journalists, and I think it is worth taking seriously.

In the essay, Gladwell makes several good points:

1. Journalists usually tend to be liberal, and it’s silly to pretend that they aren’t or that they have no political leanings, as the editor for the Washington Post does (he doesn’t even vote, and claims that he doesn’t even think about who he’d vote for if he did).

2. Having a political opinion is not the same as having a political bias. Opinions can change while a bias tends to stay the same. So this means that a journalist can be liberal without having a liberal bias, though if there is going to be a bias, it tends to be liberal.

3. There is no vast recruiting system in journalism to get liberals. It’s just something they’re naturally drawn to, just as people in the arts tend to be liberal.

4. Most pundits seem to claim that a lot of bias is caused by money being exchanged between journalist and another party, and he points out that there are more powerful relationships that don’t involve money which can cause bias.

5. His methods for trying to decrease his own bias to a very minimal amount.

It’s a wonderful essay, one of those pieces that keep you glued to every word until the very end and leaves you with that warm feeling in your stomach when you finish reading it.

Related posts: Interview with Brian Flemming, Book bound in human skin, Interview with Greg van Eekhout