Word: viewings
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...View's hosts (including executive producer Barbara Walters) get away with this because they do what the more fettered media believe they can't: address issues people actually care about--as opposed to those the respectable media care about--and say what they actually think. Once upon a time, journalists' circumspection was a source of authority; increasingly, it just seems like phoniness. And while traditional media are trying to adapt to a bloggier, more opinionated age, they're still largely accustomed to the old standards of equivalency: the notion that if candidate X commits a transgression, "balance" requires that...
...View, which has a personal-is-political philosophy and five women panelists, two of them African American. It jumped into the Palin controversies lustily, and in a June interview with Michelle Obama, Whoopi Goldberg raised the subject of the lack of media role models for dark-skinned black women. (Anyone who thinks that diversity in TV news is strictly a cosmetic issue should try to imagine Charlie Gibson asking about that...
...View--like blogs, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert--has no such problem. Are its panelists biased? Sure! They talk about their opinions all day. Goldberg and Behar are plainly pro--Barack Obama; Elisabeth Hasselbeck is an avowed conservative. Yet their interviews are actually newsworthy; Behar got McCain to go on the record supporting his surrogates' attack on Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark, and Hasselbeck, in a March interview, pressed Obama for seven minutes on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy...
...mite awkward coming from Wolf Blitzer. And Goldberg asked McCain if his support of strict-constitutionalist judges meant that she should be worried about the return of slavery, apparently unaware that the Constitution does ban slavery. But there are still things that traditional journalism could learn from The View...
First, that transparency works: you know what the panelists believe and can judge their work accordingly. (If anything, The View would benefit from Walters dialing down her studied neutrality even more.) Second, that you can speak truth to power and, if you have a following, power will still have to come back to reach your audience. (You could call this election's crucial swing bloc Wal-Mart moms or mortgage moms--or you could just call them fans of The View.) And finally, that a confrontational interview is not necessarily a bad one. (Similarly, Obama probably did himself more good...