Cockburn the Barbarian

...All publications energetically solicit advertising...

...by Michael Kinsley The schadenfreude flowed like champagne the day Alexander Cockburn got caught with his hand in the cookie jar...

...Rather, it's that reporters must obscure their biases, whereas opinion writers are paid to display them for public assessment...

...Should they stop...

...Such highmindedness is financed by a daily flood of ad revenues that must touch in some way on every conceivable story the newspaper might write about...

...Cockburn's even right that most opinion journalism is too sodden with respectability to counteract the "objective" mush all around...

...This is silly...

...You'll not be surprised to learn that the editor of The Nation is a lawyer...

...I doubt Cockburn would find that much of a defense if he uncovered a network to bribe journalists financed by wealthy American Jews...

...The company pays...

...Cockburn himself, for example, thinks it makes a difference if the money comes from a government...

...But many of the distinctions that are made are quite silly...

...The pristine view on this matter was nicely summarized by the chairman of Harper's at the time of my own troubles...

...I, too, was happy to see Cockburn embroiled in controversy, though for a different reason...

...In his farewell column in the Village Voice, he wrote that the Voice "is, and should be, a bundle of opinion and prejudice advertised as such...

...Less plausible is his claim that he was just about to give the money back when the story broke...

...Even if the purist approach is absurd, shouldn't there be some rules...

...I had begun to imagine that someday they'd find out that James Reston had been a paid Soviet agent ,for the past 50 years and the story would include a sentence to the effect, "This reminded many observers of the time Kinsley let the Israelis fly him to the Middle East!' Now I'm off the hook...

...This kind of ethical standard could turn into a nice protection racket: selling ads to organizations that wish to guarantee they won't be written about...

...No one objects to journalists sucking on respectable tits like these...

...Furthermore, I am Jewish, and a sentimental Zionist...

...Read literally, it means you can take any freebie and write anything about it as long as you don't promise to write something...

...No doubt he brings a great deal of intelligence to bear...

...After some confusion about what his objection really was, Village Voice editor David Schneiderman ultimately settled on the appearance factor as his reason for suspending Cockburn...

...Even Alexander Cockburn wouldn't want to get all his information from a paper like the Village Voice...

...It would have been even harder to come back and write a vigorous denunciation of Israel, if that were my conclusion...

...Or should they cease writing about anything related to their advertisers...

...Foreign Affairs, for example, could hardly forbid its authors to accept cash from the nations they write about, since it routinely publishes articles by heads of state...

...The Los Angeles Times trusts itself not to be corrupted by millions of dollars from tobacco companies, but doesn't trust its employees not to be corrupted by a plane ride from NATO...

...Sometimes it's hard to know where the ethics stop and insanity begins...

...On orders from the editor, he quit the staff, took the junket, rejoined the staff, and wrote the article...

...Several editors at the Post grandly declared that this would be purchasing a news story, and thus unethical...

...Cockburn thinks the very notion of objectivity is a farce...

...From now on, it will remind many observers of Alex Cockburn's grant from the Arabs...

...Clearly the subject needs some rethinking...

...But he also brings personal baggage, and he operates in a milieu where anti-Zionist sentiment is the fashion...

...There are two rules that apply to Harper's:' I was surprised to read in The Washington Post one morning...

...Any wouldbe corrupter of journalistic morals who spends $10,000 trying to bias Alexander Cockburn against Israel ought to be drummed out of the profession for rank incompetence...

...He wrote in the Voice, "I sought and was given assurances that the Institute [for Arab Studies] was not financed by nations or organizations, but by individuals both within and without the United States ." So what...

...The Times aspires to a more neutral approach, and usually succeeds, though it's useful to have someone like Cockburn around to point out when it fails...

...For purposes of this discussion, we'll assume that the transaction was made in good faith all around...

...It's not that reporters can actually achieve the pristine blankness of mind (called "objectivity") that is the conceit of their calling...

...But even opinion journalism can aspire to intellectual honesty rather than sinking complacently into a mudbath of "prejudice!' The heaviest baggage a writer carries to the word processor is his or her previous opinions, especially if they've been expressed in print...

...Even if those opinions derived long ago from the most disinterested weighing of the facts and the purest cogitation, they're now his...

...And this brings up the silliest aspect of the anguished moral debate about things like press junkets and who picks up the tab when you lunch with a source...

...Our own government, through the USIA, brings over about 150 foreign journalists a year...

...The Middle East is a particularly contentious issue, but any writer on any subject carries a similar burden...

...Cockburn's nonexistent book certainly should have indicated who paid for the research...

...But ripping off research grants is a different ethical question...

...Most publications think they can rise above it...

...It also is absurd...

...It's reasonable, for example, to hold newspaper reporters to a more fastidious standard than writers who are presenting opinion labelled as such...

...Not all distinctions are ridiculous...

...1982, when I was editor of Harper's Magazine, I accepted an invitation from the Israeli government to visit Israel and Lebanon at its expense...

...Are we all up to it every time we sit down to write...

...That's why there's also room for opinion journalism of the sort you find in the Voice or The Washington Monthly...

...So by the very highest ethical standards, you're damned if you pay and damned if you don't pay...

...A staff writer named Christopher Hitchens was offered a junket to Israel by an Arab-American group...

...Shortly after this revelation, Cockburn was "suspended indefinitely" by the Voice, and will have to fulminate for at least a while in the smaller, less remunerative, and marginally less fashionable Nation magazine...

...But the simple-minded obsession with airplane tickets and research grants is a grand exercise in missing the point...

...A Prime Minister's salary is not suspicious...

...The Mudbath of "Prejudice" However, what piddling rules and pompous ethical pronouncements prevent is not even the appearance of bias, but only the appearance of bias...

...Inevitably in the back of my mind as I wrote an article would have been the thought, "How will I face Marty...

...According to the latest formulation of its policy in a recent editorial, The Nation "prohibits editorial workers from accepting travel or other expenses from any source in return for a commitment to write an article for the magazine' This sonorous language promises more than it delivers...

...Was the money just a payoff...

...He says it would have...

...But disclosed or not, was it wrong for Cockburn to take the grant...

...The Nation publishes freelance articles from a wide variety of interested parties, but ostensibly maintains strict curbs on staff freebies...

...The trump card of the stuffed-shirt element in discussions like this one is the proposition that journalists must avoid what is usually called even the appearance of bias...

...But Cockburn could have taken an opportunity to mention the grant in one of his weekly columns, too...

...Even more accurately, Denby called Cockburn "irresistably readable:') Cockburn is a hard leftist, even something of a Soviet apologist, and virulently anti-Israel...

...That is, he or she should avoid anything that might give rise to suspicion, however illogical or unwarranted...

...But even with cash the purist view is nonsense...

...The most ridiculous web of pointless distinctions I've come across in this field has been woven by The Nation, whose editor expressed disapproval of my junket, then hired Cockburn on rebound from the Voice...

...Cockburn (rhymes with "slow burn"), best known for his columns of press criticism and political commentary in New York's Village Voice, was described accurately enough by David Denby in The New Republic as "a talented, despicable writer who enjoys vicious teasing as a kind of journalistic blood sport...

...My close friend (once and future boss) Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, is one of the leading American defenders of Israel...

...Of course, there are limits...

...A large grant to a professional journalist is...

...Should it therefore have been foreclosed from writing about energy...

...Cockburn insists he honestly intended to produce the book, but never got around to it...

...Purist Nonsense Cockburn's crime, according to the editor of the Voice, David Schneiderman, was, first, "to receive money from a group with a special political interest:' and second, "not to disclose it:' This actually leaves out the fishiest part of the Cockburn story, which is that, a year and half after the grant, he had not yet begun the book that the $10,000 supposedly was meant to finance...

...Obviously advertising does hold a potential for corruption...

...If some tortured souls of journalism had their way, newspaper and magazine articles could come to resemble a stock prospectus, in which half the space is taken up with warnings about why you shouldn't make this investment...

...Ironically, though, it is the richest, most adclogged publications that can afford to take the prissiest attitude about the financial arrangements of their writers...

...Likewise when Alexander 'Cockburn writes about the Middle East or any other subject...

...Why buy a cow when the milk is free ? Distracting Distinctions Of course, not every writer is either incorruptible or already corrupted beyond redemption...

...First, Harper's does not solicit or accept money from people whom it plans to write about...

...There's no point in needlessly creating ethical misperceptions...

...The truth is, it was very hard for me to perceive the situation there objectively...

...Anyone who goes on a propaganda junket like mine to Israel should reveal the nature of the trip when writing about it...

...Why...

...Yet surely it would be far more corrupting for a man with Cockburn's views to be taking money from one of these groups...

...One saving grace is that the ad itself constitutes disclosure of the potential conflict...

...Of course...

...But for reasons having to do with the internal politics of Harper's, this particular trip became a minor cause celebre, and since then I have become a standard reference point in many discussions of journalists' ethics...

...And surely the rewards of respectability, such as Guggenheim grants, comprise a much more dangerous temptation to American journalism than favors bestowed by shoestring groups like the Institute for Arab Studies...

...Cockburn, for example, has been thinking nasty thoughts about Israel, and writing them down for half his life...

...The question is, what was the quid pro quo...

...One way to maintain that trust is to avoid the appearance of impropriety, even when you yourself know that there's nothing improper involved...

...Having done editorial business with Cockburn, I find this plausible...

...Because the impresario, one Charles Peters, had decided that journalists should pay the fee and help cover the cost of the conference like everyone else...

...A Washington Monthly specialty is articles by present and former employees about their experiences working for government agencies...

...Now $10,000 in cash is a touchier business...

...Succumbing to a $10,000 temptation can lead to serious improvements in your lifestyle...

...The purist view would exclude them, too, though the point of the Washington Monthly article most likely would be to criticize the very source of their paycheck...

...The insistence that journalists should "pay their own way" ignores an important financial reality: professional journalists rarely pay their own way...

...Simple answer: yes...

...Maybe I could rise above all these factors, maybe not...

...We are constantly refining our guidelines on a case-by-case basis:' the editorial reassures...

...Cockburn's point, though, was that such grants would create pressure for the station to trim its sails and turn respectable...

...Cockburn's views and his acid wit assure him lots of enemies, all of whom were thrilled when the Boston Phoenix revealed that he had received a $10,000 grant from something called the Institute of Arab Studies...

...Cockburn's critics, on the other hand, think there's a difference between a grant from the provocatively named "Institute for Arab Studies': with its ill-concealed didactic agenda, and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation or the Council on Foreign Relations...

...In Michael Kinsley writes the TRB column at The New Republic and is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Another is to make sure you lay your cards on the table before the Boston Phoenix does...

...Appearances aren't worthless, and the trust of readers is worth quite a lot...

...American journalists from publications as respectable or otherwise as Foreign Affairs and the Manchester Union-Leader have gone on such government-sponsored trips before and since...

...Like everybody else on the trip, including those whose companies paid their expenses, I was getting a more-or-less one-sided view of the story...

...But of all the things that 38 made it difficult for me to be clear-minded about the war in Lebanon, who was paying for my airline ticket loomed very small...

...Some writers are interesting precisely because of their prejudices...

...The New York Times is a bundle of opinion and prejudice masquerading as 'objective fact...

...He also never told his editor or his readers about the grant...

...On a NATOsponsored junket to Europe for American editorial writers a while back, it was the Los Angeles Times that insisted on paying its employee's expenses...

...True, the cult of objectivity sometimes is phony, and even when sincere it often produces conventional wisdom labelled neutrality and obfuscation in the name of balance...

...Changing your mind is a tough mental exercise...

...Any number of reasons...

...A few rules about journalists' dealings with the outside world are perfectly reasonable...

...Last fall, when The Washington Monthly held a conference on neoliberalism (perhaps you've heard about it),The Washington Post refused to cover it...

...More than any financial arrangement, this is what prevents the journalist from seeing the subject fresh, and discussing it with an open mind...

...As a rule, the sterner a journalist's moral outrage at the thought of accepting a freebie, the longer it's likely to have been since the last time he actually paid for his own lunch...

...But shouldn't Cockburn have told his readers about the grant...

...Right or wrong, this is an extremely common practice...

...It's not a very impressive display of personal integrity to decline as a gift something you're going to get for free, anyway...

...Disclosure is important, because it helps the reader to assess what he or she is reading...

...The grant was to write a book about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which he never wrote...

...Harper's, for example, had received a one and a half million dollar grant from the ARCO corporation...

...Take once again my visit to Israel and Lebanon at the height of the Israeli invasion...

...As corrupters of clear thought and roadblocks to objectivity, the matters that ethics obsessives go on about seem petty in comparison...

...Alexander Cockburn is not a head of state, but he might as well be the Sultan of Oman for all the doubt there is about where his head is at on the Middle East...

...Of course, he got precisely the same one-sided propaganda show as the leeches from poorer publications...

...And second, Harper's does not write about people whom it has accepted money from:' This formulation strikes a note of ringing clarity...

...It charmingly suggests that anyone who violates it has, in effect, taken a bribe...

...The Boston Phoenix accused Cockburn of retrospective hypocrisy for a column criticizing the Pacifica radio network, a string of counterculture noncommercial stations, for pondering whether to take grants from corporations...

...He's stuck with them, and whatever may happen in the Middle East, it's hard to imagine any mere new fact coming along to change them, even if it came wrapped in $10,000 from the Israelis...

...The temptation to compromise your principles grows with the size of the reward...