Objectivity in journalism is an unreachable myth. Certainly, we imagine that journalists have a responsibility to be somewhat objective, in that they must avoid portraying the facts in a subjective as much as possible. But EVERYONE has biases. No matter how hard we examine ourselves, biases pop up in the least expected places. No one can be completely aware of themselves. Add this to the fact that journalism is increasingly being crowd sourced, whether literally (blogs asking for submissions) or figuratively (the rise of internet media splintering and multiplying the number of reputable publications), and its virtually impossible that we can expect journalism to retain any real integrity. This is particularly pointless when were talking about subjective medium like the various branches of the entertainment industry. Pitchfork gets laughed at for their ridiculous reviews, but everything else is just about as intelligible - reviews of video games and movies will ALWAYS be subjective and something is lost if all you do is try to report events objectively. Its impossible not to be an agent engaged in the network of meaning. You cant not write a review without revealing your stance on the subject. Thats the whole point of reviews. Objectivity arises from reading many reviews and aggregating them ala metacritic - and even then, media with particularly divisive reviews may be poorly represented by the average numbers that aggregates produce. tl;dr approach all journalism like its biased - because it is. Try out lots of different news sources rather than relying solely on one or two.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 21:53:20 +0000
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