On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 11:36:22 -0600, Shawn Willden
wrote:

Pardon me for jumping into the middle here, but I have to respond to this.

Gould 0738 wrote:
News should be objective.

That's impossible. News is *always* biased, and the whole notion of
objectivity in journalism is the biggest single factor in the political
dumbing-down of Americans that has occurred over the last few decades.
It's a recent invention, too, created in the 20th century by well-meaning
people who didn't understand that it couldn't ever work. It would be a
good idea if it could work, but it can't.

All it takes are indiscriminate adjectives inserted into the account
to establish a point of view, and at that point objectivity is gone.


Why not? Because news is collected and reported by people, and people have
biases. No matter how hard you try for complete objectivity, it can never
be achieved, because everything you see, hear and read is filtered through
your own worldview.

Exactly!


"But if they just report plain facts, with no interpretation, that's
objective by definition!" you may respond. But that's not true either, at
least not in a world as large and complex as the one we inhabit, for the
simple reason that it's not possible to report *all* of the facts. The
journalist must filter the raw facts and decide what is worth reporting and
what isn't. This filtering introduces obvious bias. Even less obvious but
perhaps more pernicious is the problem of fact-checking. While journalists
should check all of the facts they report, there are many, many levels of
checking, ranging from simple verification of the source to full-on
investigation. In an ideal world, every fact reported would be fully
investigated and verified through multiple channels, but that's simply not
possible, so journalists have to make judgements about what level of
checking is required. Naturally, "facts" that appear to violently
contradict the reporter's own worldview will get checked more thoroughly
than those that seem patently obvious, meaning that errors that the
reporter agrees with are more likely to be published than errors the
reporter does not agree with.

Then there are guy like Jayson Blair. But that's another story.....


Finally, even if individual reporters and editors were able to be purely
objective and avoid biasing their reports in any way, a few individuals
with an agenda can intentionally introduce their own biases.

What makes all of this really nasty is when the consumers of this biased
news are convinced that they are getting straight, objective news, so they
don't bother to look for and take into account the biases.

There are people who actually believe the articles in the National
Enquirer. Some people's B.S. filters don't work very well. This
usually has a lot to do with their education.


Personally, I think we as consumers of the news were much better off 100
years ago when the newspapers wore their biases on their sleeves, so to
speak. Then, at least, people knew what they were getting, and they could
use multiple, opposing sources to get a more accurate view of the world.

I find it interesting that the group of people who's idealogue have
been infiltrating the mass media and educational institutions in order
to rewrite history and promote their agendas for years now, suddenly
have a problem when the other side tries to counter it in their own
arena.

Dave