One Good Reason Journalists Shouldn't Vote

Every so often, the question crops up anew of whether journalists ought to abstain from political activities such as voting, contributing money to campaigns or even declaring their political preferences on Facebook. It's a damned-either-way sort of question: When they do show their support, critics seize on it as proof of media bias; when they pointedly decline to participate, the same critics accuse them of hiding their biases.

Weighing in this week, one William Tate even had it both ways, noting that journalists give to Democrats over Republicans at a ratio of 15:1, then observing that many news organizations prohibit political donations. "Whether it's intentional or not, the ban makes it difficult to verify the political leanings of Big Media reporters, editors and producers," he writes. (But not too difficult for William Tate, evidently.)

I recapitulated this debate, in miniature, over lunch yesterday with a friend who has far more experience as a journalist than I do. We were discussing longtime Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr.'s practice of not voting as an act of neutrality. My friend agreed with the Columbia Journalism Review blogger who mocked Downie for saying he had "stopped having even private opinions about politicians or issues so that I would have a completely open mind in supervising our coverage." "Is that neurologically possible?" wondered the blogger.

Maybe not -- but, as I pointed out to my friend, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that someone who refrains from voting, donating, etc., will have fewer and milder opinions about candidates an issue than the same person would if he allowed himself to participate vigorously. Through the workings of a psychological phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance, our actions influence our judgments just as our judgments inform our actions. About 30 seconds of Googling led me to this paper, in which economists from Harvard and Yale declared, "A vote for a candidate may lead to more favorable interpretations of his actions in the future."

My friend wasn't convinced. The citizen's responsibility to vote, he said, trumps the journalist's responsibility to preserve that extra degree of elusive neutrality. That's a valid argument. But editors who think not voting makes for fairer umpiring have a strong case of their own.