The Other Side of Objectivity

 

Another incentive to overcount comes from the American Rescue Plan of 2021, which authorizes the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay Covid-19 death benefits for funeral services, cremation, caskets, travel and a host of other expenses. The benefit is worth as much as $9,000 a person or $35,000 a family if multiple members die. By the end of 2022, FEMA had paid nearly $2.9 billion in Covid-19 death expenses.--wsj

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Is the Pentagon becoming as unreliable as the White House Press Conferences?

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Most Common Country Of Birth For Foreign-born Residents In The US, Excluding Mexico

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The Other Side of Objectivity

Former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward have released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”

In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser, insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Downie recounts how news leaders today “believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”

This is culled from a law blog by Turley (via Don). It's a peculiar position, as if math or geography were being used as debatable notions. Does the statement "Canada is north of the U.S." demand protection from another viewpoint? 

Words are meaningful. Synonyms for 'objective:' open-minded, detached, neutral, dispassionate. Antonyms: emotional, subjective.

The key point is hidden in the benign and sloppy line, "they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.” There is a word left out: "their truth." Journalism, like art, has become a field of "personal truths." A work of art is meaningful only to the artist; the audience may get it, may not. But the artist's personal vision is unassailable. There is only one vision in the artist's Rorschach Test.

The horror of modern art is that it has become meaningful only to the artist and thus has become unimportant. That will be the legacy of journalism should this strange assumption of shared visions continue.