“High-quality education for all children.” “Preparations for the long-term challenges of drought, energy supply, and climate change.” “Government transparency, open meetings and accountability.”
None of these statements should be particularly controversial, but they can sound almost radical these days; at the very least, it’s still unusual for a mainstream news organization to come right out and say it stands behind statements like these as core principles.
That’s ridiculous, says Scott Lewis, editor-in-chief of the investigative nonprofit Voice of San Diego, which includes all of the above in its new mission statement.
Lewis believes that objectivity has never actually been possible in journalism, and that newspapers’ insistence that they are “impartial observers” has hurt their mission. “The moment they decide what to cover, they’re making a subjective decision about what’s important,” he said. “When they insist they’re just being impartial observers, I think that performance hurts trust in journalists, because readers can tell that you have a perspective, that you have some underlying assumption you’re working off of.”
In December, Lewis decided that the 12-year-old Voice of San Diego needed to bring its underlying assumptions out into the open. The site’s staff and board worked together to develop a list of nine “shared values.”
“We stand for certain things in the community,” Lewis said. “We are not objective about roads being bad. We’re not objective about murder or corruption. We’re not objective about pollution.” Writing and publishing “What We Stand For” simply makes things clearer, he said. “When someone asks: What is your agenda? We can say this is our agenda. When someone asks: What is your bias? We can say this is our bias…and then we can be impartial about the solutions, nonpartisan about the way they are addressed.”
Voice of San Diego is a nonprofit with 2,600 members who pay at least $35 a year, and Lewis stressed that the published values give its board — and its readers — a means of holding it accountable: “I wanted to provide, at least, a very basic skeleton of how the public and trustees of an organization could weigh in on what we cover.”
I spoke with Lewis about why he decided Voice of San Diego needed to publish this statement, what the response to it has been, and why he thinks other news organizations should do the same thing. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Our membership soared over that period. And I’m still very proud of the conservatives and the number of people of different political perspectives that support us. We ended 2015 with 1,900 members and we ended 2016 with 2,600 paying members. That’s due to a lot of different things, but I do think there was a real coming-down-to-earth moment for people when they realized they cared a lot about what we were doing.
A lot of people wanted us to be more clear about criminal justice. They took the list of values as a statement of the things we would cover or care about, and wanted us to be more clear that [criminal justice] is an issue for us. We’ve done a lot of work on police brutality and profiling and controversies like that, and to me [that reporting] fits fine with the mission statement, but I listened to people when they said that maybe we should be more clear about where we’re coming from on it.
They’ve had this privileged, very comprehensive, almost ubiquitous presence in these communities. They felt they had to speak with the voice of God: This is the way things are. It was an authority based on formality, not “here’s how I did my work, and here’s why you should trust me.” But: “We’ve figured out what the truth is, and this is what we present to you now, in the most fair, objective possible way as decided by us, editors and reporters.”
The Internet democratized publishing and made it so that other people could pop in and say either (a) “You’ve done bad work on this” or (b) “Here we are, and we’re more interesting and we’re more conversational and here’s where we come from and here’s how we do our work.”
As fake news and weird conspiracy theories and fringe-y elements start to get more attention, there may be nostalgia for this old formality: Wow, it was nice when we could all agree on baseline facts for a community.
But that cat’s out of the bag. So we should all agree to better identify our own algorithms for how we figure out the news, and where we come from, and how we are funded, and be as honest as we can be. If a reader doesn’t want to listen to us after that, fine — we may have picked the wrong formula and not appeal to enough readers and therefore fall away.
It’s tough. But I think it has to be done.
