Voting No On Peter Baker's No-Voting Stance

Being Sanctimonious Not a Job Requirement to be White House Bureau Chief

New York Times White House bureau chief Peter Baker raised his share of hackles recently with his holier-than-thou pronouncement that he can only stay pure to his mission by not voting.

As reporters, our job is to observe, not participate, and so to that end, I don’t belong to any political party, I don’t belong to any non-journalism organization, I don’t support any candidate, I don’t give money to interest groups and I don’t vote.

Oy. And, in a lesser-reported passage, Baker related how his righteousness tends to suck the life out of a room.

I try hard not to take strong positions on public issues even in private, much to the frustration of friends and family. For me, it’s easier to stay out of the fray if I never make up my mind, even in the privacy of the kitchen or the voting booth, that one candidate is better than another, that one side is right and the other wrong.

In other words, Baker is unlike us mere mortals. Bully for him? Nah. It's just plain bull.

I once toiled for the ACLU in its media relations shop. It was there I was constantly reminded how voting is our most fundamental right, the one mentioned most often in the Constitution. How Baker believes reporters should forfeit that right for the sake of their job strains credulity. Given his pedigree, he should know better.

Reporters have to put up with a lot nowadays. The money's rarely great--though the bank the peripatetic Baker makes at the Times and contributing at all hours to MSNBC is far from chump change. For most journalists, job security is next to nil. And you have a president who apparently has little else to do than foment hatred for the First Amendment. 

At the very least, reporters should be allowed to be human and take ownership of a point of view. However, that's different from expressing that point of view in their work. That's a no-no covered in Journalism 101. It's what you signed up for. But that doesn't preclude casting a ballot and risking a tsk-tsk from Baker.

Baker has been appropriately flayed in some circles for his position, including Washington Post media scold Erik Wemple, who noted one drawback is that "non-voting journalists lend credence to the idea ... that merely having political viewpoints is, at some level, a disqualifying or problematic thing. It isn't. What matters is what's in the article (or the segment, or the video, or the podcast)."

After I wrote the above lede, I looked up the definition of hackles to make sure I was on the right track. The first one that came up was "erectile hairs along the back of a dog or other animal that rise when it's angry."

Alas, I don't have too much hair left to make erect. But after reading what Baker said, I know how the dog feels.