The Judgement of Len Downie

I always thought one of the respons­ib­il­it­ies of exer­cising judg­ment included an attempt to see the other side, or sides; to recog­nise your pre­ju­dices; weigh them, per­haps; and mit­ig­ate them. Self aware­ness was — and remains, I believe — the best rem­edy to journ­al­istic (and blog­ging) hubris.

Len Downie, Exec Editor of the Wash­ing­ton Post, prac­tised a more extreme method:

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.

I was reminded of the early Chris­tian ascetic, Ori­gen, of whom Wiki­pe­dia records:

Teach­ing through­out the day, he devoted the greater part of the night to the study of the Bible and lived a life of rigid asceti­cism. Accord­ing to some tra­di­tions, he car­ried this to such an extent that, fear­ing that his pos­i­tion as a teacher of women as well as men might give ground for scan­dal to the hea­then, he fol­lowed Mat­thew 19:12 lit­er­ally and cas­trated himself…

Tagged as: the Washington Post, Washington Post