Talking Points Memo

I'm not sure precisely when it started, but for the entirety of my professional career, and stretching back to when I was still a journalism student, our field has been going through a reckoning about "objectivity" in journalism. The rules that took hold in prior decades, which seemed to many eternal and without origin, stipulated that journalists' task was to entirely remove their perspective from reporting and to present just the facts. Any hint of subjective analysis, interpretation, or deduction was, this thinking went, strictly forbidden. Journalists in this sense were not so much human beings doing a job aided by their faculty of reason so much as recording devices.

TPM's never been like this. As we state in our mission, "The goal of our journalism is neither balance nor objectivity but accuracy, fairness and a fundamental honesty with our readers and members at all times."

Our founder Josh Marshall was recently interviewed by the Columbia Journalism Review to discuss TPM's 25th anniversary, which is coming up in November. He was asked if TPM has stayed true to its founding vision, a question that Josh said was difficult to answer because in the early years of the site he wasn't quite sure what he was doing. In a subsequent post about the interview — TPM has never shied away from meta self-reflection — he said there are at least three things that make up TPM.

1. You can't cover political news well unless you're familiar with and care about the substance.

2. Good political reporting should be something you're dying to read. It shouldn't be a chore.

3. Fundamental honesty with readers.

Josh expands on all of these in greater detail. It's worth reading the full post. If you've ever read our mission statement, these ideas all appear there as well. But it's the first point that I want to elaborate on here.

We used to break out our reporting on DC into its own section, "TPM DC," and that section had its own tagline: "In DC, not of it." It's a motto we still keep in mind, even if it doesn't appear on the site. Among the reasons we are not "of it" is the tendency for DC news outlets — and increasingly, any mainstream news outlet that covers DC at all — to vomit all over themselves in a misguided attempt at appearing "impartial" or "objective." "Objectivity" is located somewhere between the various poles of American politics. (The problem here should be obvious: the poles of American politics, and whatever midpoint exists between those poles, don't necessarily have a fixed relationship, or any relationship at all, with the truth.) In the formulation of many DC publications, politics is a sport with winners and losers. The political parties are akin to professional organizations. The consequences of legislation and policy making are not really the point. Being in power is an end in and of itself.

Compare that vision of the world with how Kate Riga reports on what lies ahead with regard to trans rights this Supreme Court term:

"There, they hope to win permission to discriminate against trans people even more broadly, as they goad the Court to state decisively that trans Americans do not get heightened legal protections […]

"The Court's docket will fill further when the new term begins, likely with many cases stemming from the Trump administration's dismantling of the federal government, its imposition of armed federal troops in blue cities, its extralegal ICE raids and detentions. And for many terms now, the Court has embraced its role as frequent culture warrior on the topics that most inflame its political allies, dealing them wins on gun rights, abortion restriction and the disenfranchisement of minorities. But this term's focus on anti-LGBTQ, specifically anti-trans, attacks reveals the extent to which the Court is walking in ever-tighter lockstep with the cultural right and devoting precious docket space to its current fixations."  

TPM's journalism is guided by a basic principle: Politics affects real people. Laws and policies and court decisions have real world consequences, and the consequences are not a mystery. Government actions make people's lives better or worse. Feigning impartiality in the name of objectivity simply results in dishonesty and a lack of transparency with readers. At TPM, we care about what the government is doing because what the government is doing affects people. That's the entire point of journalism, and it's what makes TPM TPM.