Twitter crimes and savvy worship

James Taranto criticizes Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor for The New York Times, for retweeting Think Progress’ link to its post comparing the Wall Street protests to the Boston Tea Party. Retweeting a link to a liberal blog like Think Progress “would be unremarkable coming from, say, the editor of the Times editorial page,” Taranto writes. “From Roberts, however, it reinforces perceptions that the Times’s news coverage is biased in favor of the left and against the Tea Party.” Taranto notes that many journalists disclaim that retweets don’t necessarily constitute endorsements; he sometimes tweets to material he disagrees with. Roberts, however, usually links to news stories, Taranto argues, while the Think Progress post is “pure opinion … One imagines that Roberts doesn’t mean to be partisan — that he thinks TP is making an interesting, salient point whose merits are obvious to all right-thinking people.” Roberts retweeted Think Progress’ link to the Journal story, prefacing it with “This RT is NOT an endorsement.” Zach Seward, the Journal’s editor of outreach and social media, says of Taranto’s story: ”It’s a cheap shot and contradicts itself.”

Will Bunch, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News who covered the Wall Street protests early on, gave as good an explanation as we’re likely to get during a recent appearance on Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” program on Current TV. Commenting on the early non-coverage or condescending coverage of the Wall Street protests, Bunch said: “A lot of people in newsrooms still are not in touch with the real pain and the real suffering of 25 million who are unemployed and underemployed.” Paraphrasing PressThink weblog editor Jay Rosen, Bunch said: “It’s kind of un-cool for a journalist to take these people who want to change the world seriously.” Olbermann chimed in that if the more than 1,000 people on the first day of the Wall Street protests had been Tea Party-ers protesting Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s monetary stimulus policies, it would have been “the lead story on every network.”

Rosen, who also teaches journalism at New York University, coined the term “the church of the savvy” for Washington journalists who regard savviness – rather than being right or wrong – as “the prime virtue.” As Rosen has observed: “The savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you...They say: I am closer to reality than you. And more mature.” To the savvy, “the center is the holy place: political grace resides there. The profane is the ideological extremes. The adults converse in the pragmatic middle ground where insiders cut their deals. On the wings are the playgrounds for children.” The savvy position themselves as “practical, hardheaded, unsentimental, and shrewd where others are didactic, ideological, and dreamy...”

Many journalists, it seems, pay lip service to the First Amendment, but turn their backs or grow disdainful when people actually exercise these rights in the streets. In such a climate, idealistic activists such as those at the tar sands pipeline and Wall Street protests, obviously, can be safely ignored by the major news media or condescended to as not being rooted in the practical, real world. Real grown-ups don’t need to protest.