Proportionality in Journalism
Journalists take objectivity to mean fairness; they understand their primary imperative to be, "Get both sides of the story."
The problem is thus: if an entity is objectively bad, or even objectively evil (and both do in fact exist in the real world), the journalist's drive for fairness makes his reporting inherently biased towards evil, because he will reestablish the statistical median artificially and inaccurately, which has the effect of watering down knowledge and discarding lessons of history. A phenomenon like Nazi Germany, which produced data with a negative to positive statistical ratio of about 1000 to 1, becomes a much different creature when a supposedly enlightened journalist revisits that balance and creates a negative to positive ratio of, lets say, 11 to 2.
The sophistication of our journalists, as we are well aware, also inaccurately skews objective good, but in the other way towards bad. This is even embraced by journalists, if by implication, when they claim dissent as a virtue of its own, without regard to that which is dissented from. The inevitable "but" that attends good news from Iraq is a true, but disproportionate, qualifier, much like "Mussolini making the trains run on time." The confines of time and space make even mentioning it suspect. If the qualifier appears in a 600 page book, its harm is limited. If it is mentioned in a 600 word article, it is almost obscene.
Objectivity is hard, there is no denying that, but the short-cut rule of "fair and balanced" is a sure way to miss it. It speaks of a loss of judgment, a misplaced value system that can only gain credence in an abstracted world that has ceased interacting with reality. Journalists in that sense are cultural autistics and historical amnesiacs.
Most things are non-neutral, so a neutral approach to reporting news is bound to fail. When there is a finite space to report almost infinite data, proportionality must be adhered to. Anything less is unsophisticated.
The problem is thus: if an entity is objectively bad, or even objectively evil (and both do in fact exist in the real world), the journalist's drive for fairness makes his reporting inherently biased towards evil, because he will reestablish the statistical median artificially and inaccurately, which has the effect of watering down knowledge and discarding lessons of history. A phenomenon like Nazi Germany, which produced data with a negative to positive statistical ratio of about 1000 to 1, becomes a much different creature when a supposedly enlightened journalist revisits that balance and creates a negative to positive ratio of, lets say, 11 to 2.
The sophistication of our journalists, as we are well aware, also inaccurately skews objective good, but in the other way towards bad. This is even embraced by journalists, if by implication, when they claim dissent as a virtue of its own, without regard to that which is dissented from. The inevitable "but" that attends good news from Iraq is a true, but disproportionate, qualifier, much like "Mussolini making the trains run on time." The confines of time and space make even mentioning it suspect. If the qualifier appears in a 600 page book, its harm is limited. If it is mentioned in a 600 word article, it is almost obscene.
Objectivity is hard, there is no denying that, but the short-cut rule of "fair and balanced" is a sure way to miss it. It speaks of a loss of judgment, a misplaced value system that can only gain credence in an abstracted world that has ceased interacting with reality. Journalists in that sense are cultural autistics and historical amnesiacs.
Most things are non-neutral, so a neutral approach to reporting news is bound to fail. When there is a finite space to report almost infinite data, proportionality must be adhered to. Anything less is unsophisticated.
posted by John Aristides at 10:02 AM
1 Comments:
Remember most J. guys are on the left, so they think they are being objective and balanced, they just think Teddy is the center. So Roberts is right wing.
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