What color is your journalism?

"Oh, I know all about reporters. A lot of daffy buttinskis running around without a nickel in their pockets, and for what? So a million hired girls and motormen's wives'll know what's going on?"

Objective journalism has been under attack on both sides of the pond this week, by The New Statesman and no lesser light than David Brooks. Ross Douthat, two-handed as always, weighs in:

The better or worse is too complicated to untangle in a blog post, but here's an obvious way to look at it: the old working-class journalism probably produced better writing-there were fewer pesky fact-checkers hanging over the shoulders of the great New Yorker writers of the 1940s, say, who were often half-reporters and half-fabulists-but the new elite journalism probably produces better, well, journalism. Reporters today are usually more accurate and conscientious than they used to be (depending on what you think of the Times's recent national security reportage) and there's a greater sense of journalism as a calling, and of the need to inform the public as well as titillate them.

While it is certainly true that good writing is a higher priority for me than good journalism, I don't think that's why I would prefer to see a rebirth of the partisan press. For one thing, the job of a journalist isn't simply to inform the public; it's to inform the public in order that they can then be responsible and effective citizens of our democracy. If a reporter gives you facts without making you care, he has failed to fulfill his ultimate goal of enriching civic discourse, and the best way to make someone care is to tell a good story.

People have asked me if Fox News is the kind of partisan reporting I'm looking for; the embarrassing answer is essentially yes, with a couple of caveats, the first being that Fox News in a vacuum of like-minded competitors does more harm than good. Most news outlets are so caught up in the idea that respectability means objectivity that they treat a partisan outlet like Fox as a sideshow. This is a problem insofar as it means they don't really put their shoulders into attacking Fox's credibility (when they, for instance, make factual errors), since few of them can imagine that Fox had any credibility to begin with.

If, on the other hand, conservative and liberal news outlets engaged in frequent attempts to humiliate the opposition, that might be the kind of honest trash I could get on board with. Whether or not it's your kind of trash is a matter of taste, but we should all be able to agree that, as long as there are people who take Fox's journalists seriously, there should be liberal and conservative reporters who take seriously the task of calling them out. Thinking of Fox as a sideshow only allows their factually dishonest reporting (which even for a partisan press is not okay) to go on unchecked.

All of that being said, if partisan journalists were less like Fox News and more like His Girl Friday, that would be best of all. The real reason tabloid reporters are better than White House Press Corps types: better scrappy than slick. They believe in "a greater sense of journalism as a calling"; how else do you explain their penny salaries?