Retiring WaPo editor claims he stopped having private opinions about issues

Romenesko has this tidbit from a web chat with retiring Washington Post editor, Leonard Downie Jr.:

Arlington, Va.: You are known for being so objective that you don't vote. Now that you are retiring, will register and vote?

Leonard Downie Jr.: I'll have to think about that since I didn't just stop voting, I stopped having even private opinions about politicians or issues so that I would have a completely open mind in supervising our coverage. It may be hard to change.

Falsehood, self-delusion, or terrifying statement of fact? In your private opinion...

Update: A personal reminiscence from a longtime reader who asks to remain anonymous.

I actually know Len Downie a little. He was the father of a classmate of mine growing up, and even before he took over as Top Cheese at WaPo, he had this whole objective TO THE EXTREME thing going on.

Two things that have stayed with me since I was a kid and he came to visit our classes:

(1)  When he came and spoke in front of our class he would tell us that he didn't vote because he wanted to maintain his objectivity (as if the activity of voting, rather than the thought behind it, would compromise it).  Obviously, being in 6th, 7th and 8th grade, I didn't really get the ludicrousness of it.  I will say, however, that he expressed this opinion very sincerely.  He is as deceived as he is deceiving.

(2) I do remember him talking about objectivity, and then talking about taking things the Pentagon had said during Iraq War I at face value, even though he was pretty sure they were being dishonest because there was a war on. He said it with pride (this was in the couple of years afterward the war when America being totally Awesome and Righteous was still in vogue even at the hippie school I went to).  I remember being struck by that even then, that I knew I couldn't trust the media in war time if they felt that knowingly deceiving themselves in a time of war was a virtue.

Anyway... so that's that.

Comments

[Crusty Dem]

It can't be all three, but I'll go with Terrifying statement of self-delusional fact. It's truly frightening that anyone would think they are so impartial they have no opinions. If you are capable of completely subverting opinion, you're not capable of discerning truth from lie or right from wrong. Of course, we already knew this about Len Downie, didn't we?

[Jason Lefkowitz]

I used to hear this stuff from guest lecturers in my journalism classes in college. One guy even stated proudly that he had never voted since becoming a journalist, since voting would mean holding an opinion and he, as a journalist, could not afford that particular luxury.

A human being without opinions is, of course, a logical impossibility but there seems to be a non-trivial number of journalists who believe that they have found a way to become one.

[Doyle Saylor]

Aside from the above comments which I agree with about opinion can't be suppressed, it is also quite clear that opinion is being manufactured but control is exerted from the owners level. And in another sense the kind of opinion is not like nineteenth century opinion. The gradual loss of diverse opinion over the last century is tied closely to marketing in which selling junk and supporting junk is the dominant opinion. The so-called ethics of journalism come down to a judgement about how to tamp down intense feelings in a political sense and sell intense feelings as isolated individual moments of sensation.

That said, opinion or beliefs have had a bad reputation due to partisan fighting after WWI. So I would argue not so much to unleash public opinion but to consider what needs could be met through regulation and active public support for positions.

[RickD]

There is something deeply wrong with the personal philosophy of a man who confuses 'unbiased' with 'opinion-free'. And one thing that is worse about his presumption of 'objectivity' is that he is completely self-delusional if he thinks that refusing to think deeply about issues somehow preserves objectivity. Bias is only countered effectively by activity thinking through issues. Downie has it completely backwards!