A close acquaintance in a Yahoo! public relations group posted an interesting opinion about how much value newspapers readers place in newspapers' objectivity:
"I have always believed that readers don't care nearly as much about objectivity and newsroom independence as journalists seem to think they do."
So, I'm asking: How much do you value the objectivity of the news reporting of newspapers? I assume we can include TV and radio news reports in the discussion.
Having worked for two small dailies and one weekly early in my career, I'm of the opinion that "hometown newspapers" are seldom liked, much less appreciated. There's always ample (often justified) amount of criticism aimed at the "local" newspaper -- no matter where it is.
So, no matter how objective newspapers really are, they can't win. But, they are still read.
And, its readers are generally intelligent enough to see when a story is slanted. So, we can make up our own minds about the news topic.
Thoughts?
-- Mike
Maybe the reason why conservative talk radio and a Web site like Daily Kos work so well is because they don't attempt to be objective. You know where they're coming from.
I thought I had bookmarked a recent article about opinion journalism, but I can't find it. Here's this Slate article from March 2006 titled How opinion journalism could change the face of the news. Some excerpts :
Journalists who claim to have developed no opinions about what they cover are either lying or deeply incurious and unreflective about the world around them. In either case, they might be happier in another line of work.
Or perhaps objectivity is supposed to be a shimmering, unreachable destination, but the journey itself is purifying, as you mentally pick up your biases and put them aside, one-by-one. Is that the idea? It has a pleasing, Buddhist flavor. But that's no substitute for sense. Nobody believes in objectivity, if that means neutrality on any question about which two people somewhere on the planet might disagree.
Would it be the end of the world if American newspapers abandoned the cult of objectivity?
Most of the world's newspapers, in fact, already make no pretense of anything close to objectivity in the American sense. But readers of the good ones (such as the Guardian or Financial Times of London, to name the most obvious English-language examples) come away as well-informed as the readers of any "objective" American newspaper.
Opinion journalism can be more honest than objective-style journalism because it doesn't have to hide its point of view. It doesn't have to follow a trail of evidence or line of reasoning until one step before the conclusion and then slam on the brakes for fear of falling into the gulch of subjectivity. All observations are subjective. Writers freed of artificial objectivity can try to determine the whole truth about their subject and then tell it whole to the world.
Abandoning the pretense of objectivity does not mean abandoning the journalist's most important obligation, which is factual accuracy. In fact, the practice of opinion journalism brings additional ethical obligations. These can be summarized in two words: intellectual honesty.posted by jr on Oct 25, 2007 at 02:31:20 pm #