You decide.
In today's Boston Globe, she is quoted as saying liberal bloggers went "too far" in investigating Jeff Gannon, and that no "traditional journalist" would use the techniques that bloggers did.
Of course, back in September, 2004, she was singing the praises of right-wing bloggers for "uncovering" the CBS Memogate story (put aside for the moment that virtually all of the initial claims by Buckhead were wrong). Here's what she said then about bloggers:
In its many roles, the blogosphere will make us better journalists. Blogs have formed to monitor individual newsrooms and even certain journalists.
It's a sure bet that bloggers will continue to challenge and undermine the work of journalists. In response, journalists will get better and tougher. Anticipating the constant scrutiny, reporters will tell readers and editors where they got their information, why they think it's sound, what they did to check out their sources.
Journalists can no longer assume the audience will trust the story. Instead, newsrooms will take extra steps to articulate their mission and educate their audience with every story, every day. This is what we did. This is how we did it. This is why you should trust us. We used to hide all this. We didn't want the competition retracing our steps, tracking down our sources, doing a better story. The mystery of making the news is no longer worth preserving.
Boy, those blogs are great, aren't they? Except when they're not, huh, Kelly?
So who is Kelly McBride? Here is her resume. Former reporter, six years as police reporter, 8 as religion reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Hmmmm. Religion reporter. Also has a master's degree in religion from Gonzaga. More hmmmmm. But hey, just because you're a religion reporter and have a master's in religion doesn't make you a wingnut, does it? No, but read on.
Here is a very telling article she wrote about "values" after the election. Note the emphasis, which is mine:
Whenever someone says moral values these days, I get a sense of déjà vu. Haven't we journalists already had this conversation? Haven't we been talking about this all along?
It's easy to say the media are out of touch. And I won't even try to argue to the contrary. Newsrooms continue to struggle and flounder in their attempts to reflect the lives and concerns of conservative Americans.
But this conversation did not begin with an exit poll on Nov. 2. If we're going to get better, we have to understand where we are on this journey.
Ten years ago I became part of a nationwide trend in journalism. My boss at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., made me a religion writer. I joined a small army of journalists carving out a new plan for covering some of the oldest stories.
We had a mandate to make up for the sins of our brethren.
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, people of all faiths were getting fed up with the way the media covered religion, faith, and spirituality. The First Amendment Center published a report in 1993 that detailed the frustration and eroding credibility newsrooms were breeding among the faithful. "Bridging the Gap: Religion and the News Media" pointed out that many journalists lacked savvy and knowledge when it came to religion. That ignorance led to mistakes, misrepresentations, and an over-simplification of complicated issues.
So much progress had been made in such a short time that, in 2000, the First Amendment Center published an update. The center noted that faith had emerged as a force in public life, that newsrooms were devoting more resources to covering the topic and that, as a whole, journalists seemed to be much more literate about religion and spirituality.
In November 1994, the Republicans gained a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1955. The Christian Coalition claimed credit for lining up a lot of GOP support among evangelical Christians and a new era of political conservatism was born.
Newsrooms took notice. In ensuing years, trade journals documented the rise of religion journalism. A national TV network, ABC, even hired a religion reporter, according to a 1995 story in the American Journalism Review.
Religion reporters had an impact that went beyond their own work. Rebecca Nappi is a columnist at The Spokesman-Review. She once pointed out that after I got the religion beat, issues of faith began showing up on the sports pages and even in the editorials. "It was as if people needed permission to write about it."
Although some of our colleagues doubted we could do "real" journalism, meaning hard-hitting, serious stories about faith, the audience loved it. Readers applauded when The Dallas Morning News launched a weekly section that treated faith and spirituality as a topic just as worthy as sports or entertainment.
It didn't take long for religion stories to become a regular feature on daily budgets. And the doubts about whether newsrooms could cover faith critically faded as The Boston Globe broke open the Catholic clergy abuse scandal.
On Election Day, exit polls found big support for "moral values," and the pundits called the media out of touch. My first question was: What happened?
Religion reporters took a hit in the layoffs and cutbacks that began in 2001. Pages were cut, budgets were slashed, and many religion reporters found themselves with additional or different duties. Did we erase all the progress that had been made to that point? Was it just an illusion in the first place?
Maybe we just haven't had enough time. Maybe we just haven't gone far enough. Or deep enough. Yet.
Sure it's OK to quote the high school running back as he gives God credit for his great game. It's perfectly acceptable to pick apart the nuance of politicians' personal belief system.
We cover faith and politics as if they are separate, isolated compartments in the lives our readers and viewers. In fact, most people live their faith and their politics every moment of every day. For many people, praying and voting are separate blossoms that grow from the same root.
Maybe our mistake has been to separate religion and politics into entirely different areas of coverage. What if political reporters and religion reporters swapped beats? Or worked on the same teams? For news-gathering purposes, the two disciplines are miles apart. Religion reporters tilt toward feature writing, political reporters toward a mix of daily and investigative work.
For the most part, religion writers produce fewer and longer stories. Political reporters burn up the keyboard. Yet if you look at the issues through the eyes of the individual, faith (or spirituality, or the absence of faith) and politics exist side by side. They are the places where people find and express meaning. They inform a sense of right and wrong and all that is in between.
My guess is the coverage of both topics would be transformed by closer associations in the newsroom.
It's clear now that we haven't gone far enough in coverage of faith and related issues. But it's not fair or accurate to dismiss the thousands of journalists who work in mainstream newsrooms as out of touch. Great strides have been made in the past decade of journalism that can't be erased.
So where do go from here?
First, of course, the whole "values" thing from the exit polls turned out to be a load of shit. Did McBride follow up? Ummm, no.
So, let's review Ms. McBride's views. Issues of faith and spirituality are uniquely "conservative." Religion reporters were "making up for the sins of their brethren." Faith is an important part of public life, including politics. The 1994 elections were all about faith, and that faith, again, was uniquely conservative in nature. Praying and voting are inseparable. We haven't gone far enough in this country with public coverage and acknowledgement of religion.
Yowza. Is this woman a media ethics specialist or a religious fundamentalist? On her bio page at the Poynter Institute, it says that she
Dissects the tension that arises when professional ethics conflict with personal ethics and newsroom cultures conflict with other cultures. Teaches journalists to explore that tension in order to make better decisions and ultimately to tell better stories.
Tee hee. It sounds like the teacher needs a remedial course in basic journalistic ethics.
This is a woman with a clear and unequivocally political bent to her views on "religion." How she came to be seen as an expert on media ethics is beyond my comprehension. Why the Boston Globe went to this woman, out of all the media organizations they could have sought out, is also a mystery.
My view is this: the media hates the Gannon story, for multiple reasons. First and foremost, they didn't break it. Second, it involves the media as a substantial player in the story. This guy has been under their noses for months, and they ignored the obvious hypocrisy of his even being there until it was too significant to ignore -- the blogs had broken the story, and there was the (still) lingering question of how this putz came into possession of CIA memos that no one else had. So find someone to trash the blogs, and if she happens to have just praised the blogs to the heavens several months ago, well, who's going to figure that out?
Well, guess what? We figured it out. And now it turns out that their "ethics guru" is a right wing hack who sees herself on a mission to inject religion into the public arena at every opportunity. Oopsy.
Score another one for the good guys.