Okrent’s new column argues for a journalistic trend I absolutely believe in: That journalists should be more free to include their own conclusions, based on their reporting, in stories.

“But haven’t we reached the point where denying the reader what a writer knows to be true is far more unfair than including it? I was delighted when, in ‘After 6 Months, Tyco Prosecutors Close Case Against Ex-Officials’ (March 18), Alex Berenson described the prosecutor’s case as ‘bewildering,’ ‘tedious’ and having ‘rarely been presented in a straightforward way’ - a vision of the trial that would have been utterly unavailable had Berenson not dared to offer conclusive characterizations based on his own observations. On a much larger scale, I was dismayed when a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in a letter to friends (later passed around the Internet) described the horrors of life in Baghdad, and was criticized in some quarters for thereby jeopardizing her impartiality. But what she described was based on indisputable first-hand experience. If there was a journalistic offense here, it was that readers of The Journal had been denied knowledge of what this reporter knew to be true. Whom did that serve?”

Imposing false balance where there is none helps no one.

Also of note from the Sunday Times: Sitting in for Old Man Safire is none other than crabwalk.com-reader Erin McKean.

15 November 2004

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