Remember how, after the presidential debates in 2000, each network would roll out its panel of undecideds. ?Did this exchange help you make up your mind?? a kindly interviewer would ask. ?Well, I really liked what Gore had to say, but I agreed with Bush a lot, too. I still haven?t made up my mind,? the cheery voter would announce.
Let unsaid was the fact that, if the voter had announced he?d made a decision, he wouldn?t have been invited back after the next debate. When you reward indecisiveness, you get indecisiveness.
Indeed, it would have been more interesting to hear from a panel of harsh partisans.
Imagine an interviewer asking a viewer to explain why he still supported Bush, even though his candidate sometimes seemed lost during the debate. Or to tell us why she still backed Gore, when he seemed so condescending and programmed.
A bit of partisanship would actually be a return to our journalistic roots, since the British style has a long history on our side of the Atlantic. Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Post to serve as a vehicle for his federalist political ideas.
Readers back then knew what they were getting, and liked it.
In recent years, the Post has again started taking on a more partisan flavor, becoming something of a conservative counterpart to The New York Times. And in so doing, it?s come back from the dead to become one of the top-10 selling papers in the country.
Elsewhere, viewership is soaring at the conservative Fox News channel. ?Since 2000, the number of Americans who regularly watch Fox News has increased by nearly half from 17 percent to 25 percent,? a Pew survey found. Meanwhile, ?audiences for other cable outlets have been flat at best.? Clearly, viewers and readers are responding to a bit of media honesty.
Let?s give the British way a try. By finally admitting their biases, American news outlets would simply be coming clean for their readers and viewers. That should help boost circulation and ratings, and could as much as double the number of newspapers, assuming a conservative daily opens in every city to challenge the dominant liberal paper. Besides, in journalism, honesty would be the best policy.