Dear Mike:
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I was saddened by the fact that she had to recant. I realize that the Tribune has come under attack from voices in the Jewish community as having an “anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian bias.” (There are other voices in the community that may disagree; mine, for one.) I have found the Trib’s coverage of this crisis eminently more evenhanded and fair than that of any other large establishment newspaper in the country.
But the issue raised by the Peres case is far deeper and older than this contemporary tragedy. It is the right of a journalist to express a personal opinion, publicly if need be, on an issue outside his/her curriculum.
“I cannot remember how often I have been challenged, and especially in America, for disregarding the fundamental tenet of honest journalism, which is objectivity. This argument has risen over the years, but of course it reached a fortissimo–long years after this–when I had been to Hanoi and returned obsessed with the notion that I had no professional justification left if I did not at least try to make the point that North Viet Nam, despite all official Washington arguments to the contrary, was inhabited by human beings….I still do not see how a reporter attempting to define a situation involving some sort of ethical conflict can do it with sufficient demonstrable neutrality to fulfill some arbitrary concept of “objectivity.” It never occurred to me, in such a situation, to be other than subjective, and as obviously so as I could manage to be. I may not have always been satisfactorily balanced; I tended to argue that objectivity was of less importance than the truth, and that the reporter whose technique was informed by no opinion lacked a very serious dimension.”
