I’ve just read Michael Kinsley’s “The Twilight of Objectivity” on Slate. This article talks about how American TV journalism is descending into opinionated, personality-driven ranting. Because that’s what TV executives think the public want.
A couple of nice quotes in it:
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. May a reporter take as a given that two plus two is four? Should a newspaper strive to be open-minded about Osama Bin Laden?
I think this touches on the critical point about objectivity (a point which also came up when I was studying history at Oxford): objectivity is unobtainable but we must strive to obtain it. Only in this way can we be objective about our partiality.
Another interesting point is that while TV news in America is getting more opinionated, print media still holds objectivity as the sine qua non of its existence. On a personal note, I sometimes find the quality US papers to be a bit starchy but much better written and more insightful than most of the UK dailies. I read The Telegraph at my mother’s the other day and there were at least two ‘lifestyle’ pieces that made 1,500 words out of a single, dubious research-led press release. Yuck! Here’s what Kinsley says:
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.
What he doesn’t say is that a British reader would know where the Guardian or FT was coming from in terms of politics and purpose. I wonder if most viewers of Fox News could identify it’s bias but I suspect most readers of the NYT, Washington Post or San Francisco Chronicle would absolutely trust to the objective intentions of their paper (Jason Blayre et. al. notwithstanding).
My favourite quote though, which sums up a feeling I often have but can’t express:
But that’s just a personal gripe … easily resolved by a slavish apology.
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