Slate's Press Box columnist, Jack Shafer, took a break from beating up on Judith Miller to chide Matt Miller for a proposal in his new book, The Two Percent Solution. (No relation between the Miller's, far as I know: what is it with Shafer and that name, anyway?)

Matt Miller, the able and patient host of KCRW's Left Right and Center (he must be patient, he puts up with Bob Scheer every week), argues in his book for, among other things, newspapers to run a feature he calls 'Still True Today'. (As I enjoy Miller's work on KCRW, I must admit with embarassment that I haven't read his book yet, hence I'm relying on Shafer's quotations here). Shafer describes Miller's idea as follows:

Setting aside the wisdom of Miller's $200 billion proposal [the main thrust of his book; I leave this to another post - NZB], he believes newspapers should raise awareness of America's unmet health, education, and income needs with a daily feature called "Still True Today." Bannered across the bottom inch of Page One (just 2 percent of a standard broadsheet!), "Still True Today" would "institutionalize regular attention for things that are important even though there's not 'news' in them," Miller writes. One day the feature would explain, "42 million Americans are uninsured—80 percent in families with a full-time worker," another it would say "2 million teachers need to be recruited in the next decade, while the average teacher salary is $40,000." (See accompanying graphic adapted from Miller's book.)

The Burma Shave messages would change daily, with health promoted on Monday, education on Tuesday, and the working poor on Wednesday. Miller writes, "The exercise would require our top papers to put forward what they think are the most important things citizens need to remain aware of even as the news changes each day. It might help set the agenda for the papers' in-depth reporting projects. The art department could make sure this recurring feature was fun and lively."

Shafer objects to Miller's idea, declaring:

One would think that the political parties, think tanks, and special interest groups—designed from the bottom up as partisan bodies—would be the logical object of Miller's lobbying to get "important" and "uncovered" issues that matter to him into the news, and not the non-partisan press. Surely it would be easier to persuade the Democratic Party or the Greens to embrace the 2 percent solution than to arrange its sale to Downie, Bill Keller, John Carroll, and Paul Steiger. But no, says Miller. The responsibility falls to the press because the parties aren't "addressing these issues seriously."

Miller admits to a political motivation for pushing his particular slate of 'Still True' items, but also acknowledges that he'd be fine with opposing viewpoints as well (Shafer: "Miller concedes his political motivation but thinks the idea of bannering important and allegedly overlooked topics would improve our culture, even if newspapers stressed conservative facts that ran against his vision—such as, taxes are too high.")

The remarkable thing to me in this debate is that Shafer acts as if this kind of feature is something radical and out-of-sync with the decisions that news editors make every single day (he dismisses it as a revival of "public journalism"). But that's the classic fantasy of "objective journalism": pretending that a newspaper's selection of the stories it covers each day don't inherently contain some bias. Every day, an uncountable number of events occur that, with the choice of an editor, could become a news story --- and every day, for any given paper, only the tiniest percentage of them actually make the front page.

Choosing which stories that happened in the recent past to cover and which not to cover is what news editors do, and Shafer presumably doesn't have a problem with that. Now Miller wants them to also extend that coverage, and their judgment, to the realm of information --- let's put aside the troublesome word 'news' for a moment --- that is factual and true, but which doesn't happened to have changed in the recent past. Why is this a fundamentally different activity that, structurally, holds any more inherent bias than normal news coverage?

To be sure, if a newspaper did nothing but run Miller's own self-selected list of Still True items, that would be activist journalism. But that would also be true if they ran nothing but news analysis pieces about Miller's opinions as well. In his criticism, Shafer is confusing Miller's activism in pushing his views with the mechanism he proposes to use --- a mechanism which has the potential to be just as 'objective' and neutral as the news pages themselves.

News is biased --- in particular, it is biased towards ignoring anything that hasn't changed in a long time, and focusing only on the day-to-day churn of that which has. Miller's suggestion to alter that hummingbird-like focus on the current moment is a good one that, implemented responsibly, could certainly provide a valuable --- and objective --- supplement to existing news coverage.

Now, if we can only convince Shafer... and the news editors themselves, of course...

Also: Eugene Volokh notes (brief) approval of Miller's criticism.