Trust me. I'm objective!

My old employer, the European Journalism Center, has me writing a column on the Magazine section of their website. While the articles appear on the EJC website first, I'm able to republish them at my discretion after two weeks. Since Newsvine is devoted to and representative of the new media ideals that I often refer to in my column, I've decided to republish them here instead of reselling them.

This article was originally published on October 17, 2007 the EJC's website.

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That's right. I'm objective. My capacity to sit down and write means that I have no biases, preconceptions, prejudices, politics or agendas. I arrived, fresh from Mars, to view the media landscape with complete and unhindered truthiness. So sit back, read and relax in the confidence that what you're seeing represents reality as it is.

Why? It's because I measure my objectivity against your (as in, "everyone else's") complete lack of it. I'm objective because I insist I am, and you are not because I insist you're not. That must be why no one ever agrees with me.

One has only to peruse the Wikipedia list of newspapers to find proof of my objectivity. I am neither left nor right, – nor center-left, center-right, or far-left or far-right – moderate, tabloid, liberal or conservative, socialist, communist or Catholic, nationalist, pro-European or Euro-skeptical. Obviously if all these publications are all objective, then none of them are. I'm all that's left.

On September 20, Slate published an article about FactCheck.org and recent initiatives by the Washington Post and the St. Petersburg Times it engendered, to check the level of truthfulness in politician's statements. The article began by citing an exasperated Bob Garfield, host of On the Media, who exclaimed that media outlets failed to call Bush Attorney General Gonzalez's testimony before the US Congress lying. It is, after all, a mark of objectivity not to pass judgment on such things, to let the reader decide when a lie is a lie…isn't it?

A few weeks ago, when Dan Rather filed suit against his former employers at CBS news over a report in 2004 on George Bush's Vietnam service (or lack thereof), his former colleague Mary Mapes jumped to his defense in her blog for the Huffington Post.

"…we showed for the first time a cache of documents allegedly written by Bush's former commander. The documents supported a mountain of other evidence that young Bush had dodged his duty and not been punished. They did not in any way diverge from the information in the sketchy pieces of the president's official record made available by the White House or the National Guard. In fact, to the few people who had gone to the trouble of examining the Bush record, these papers filled in some of the blanks."

The entire affair struck the heart of the objectivity debate. Whereas Rather and Mapes insist that the story was well documented despite the faulty papers, the Conservative blogosphere offered that one weak link made the whole thing subjective and, thus, untrustworthy. If only they'd asked me, I could have told them the truth. Alas, no one did.

Journalists are slowly learning that objectivity is not only difficult, it's impossible. But that's OK. Apparently, old school journalists were not so obsessed with objectivity. According to The Nation's Marvin Kitman, the recent experiment to replace Dan Rather with Katie Couric on America's CBS Evening News failed because…

"…What the evening news shows need is less "objectivity" and more analysis. The problem with objective journalism is that it doesn't exist and never did. Molly Ivins disposed of the objectivity question for all time when she observed in 1993, "The fact is that I am a 49-year-old white female, a college-educated Texan….There's no way in hell that I'm going to see anything the same way that a 15-year-old black high school dropout does. We all see the world from where we stand. Anybody who's ever interviewed five eyewitnesses to an automobile accident knows there's no such thing as objectivity."

The article cites Edward R. Murrow, who would run the headlines and then offer both analysis and even entertainment (usually at the behest of the network) to accompany it. Murrow never pretended to be objective, but rather honest. People watched Murrow and trusted him because he and his cadre of reporters paid their dues, mostly in the war torn Europe of the 1930's and 40's. They weren't out to objectify, but to clarify and provoke without the pretense of journalistic indifference.

Kitman cites MSNBC's Keith Olbermann as the ideal model for the modern Murrow. Olbermann, says Kitman, isn't Murrow, but "He is…what Ed Murrow might sound like today, changing with the times as a good newsman should." And this, despite the fact that Olbermann launched into a July 3rd tirade that included, "I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11." And he didn't stop. Olbermann went on with a list of "I accuse" that would stop the heart of any weak-kneed news junkie. He did, in essence, what conservatives have been doing all along, except without the pretence of objectivity.

As mainstream media slowly crashes into the blogosphere – where objective language is often considered anathema to honesty – we must come to terms with the notion of objectivity in reporting and admit, as Ivins observed, "…objective journalism…doesn't exist and never did."

And here's another bit to chew on. As much as journalists have an obligation to strive for objectivity, readers – especially in the context of new media – have the obligation to think. You, all of you, journalists or otherwise, are no longer tacit consumers who pay for objectivity in print and swallow it whole. As citizens, you have duties, and among those duties is that you must interpret what you read responsibly and strive for objectivity in your appraisal. In the new world of media democratization we are all responsible…

…except for me. Remember, when other journalists say "objectivity," what they really mean is "honesty," that is, the willingness to admit that your piece, written at the last minute and just barely in on deadline, might be open to interpretation and might contain "subjective facts." When they say "opinion," what they really mean is "bias." Other journalists might try admitting that objectivity – or lack of bias – is like the word "perfection," a goal that is aspired to but never truly obtained, and go on reporting, writing and editorializing with full disclosure to the reader that reality is a thing constructed by the individual, and news is no different.

Except, of course, for me; I'll keep telling it like it is.