This is the guy I think I’ve been channeling lately…

From Newsday ….

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The problem is ‘objectivity’
By Marvin Kitman

October 3, 2004

Let us say, for argument’s sake, that Dan Rather allowed himself to be duped in the National Guard memo flap. There were ulterior motives in his refusal to see that, to use a Ratherism, “this dog won’t hunt.”

Let us say, for argument’s sake, that he is anti-Bush. Like roughly half the American people, he doesn’t want four more years.

Let us assume, further, that he is a crypto-Democrat. “Crypto?” as one conservative friend said. “He is a card-carrying member of the DNC.”

For argument’s sake, let us say that Dan Rather is not as objective as he makes out as the robotic anchorman reading from the TelePrompTer. He has no opinions about what he is intoning.

Let us assume, dare I say it, that “The CBS Evening News” and “60 Minutes”
are not objective journalism, whatever they may piously say in their stringent self-analysis.

Let us further argue that the whole concept of “objective news” is a sham, like “the fair and balanced” claim of, to choose one cable news network at random, Fox.

And the same thing can be said of CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, NPR, WINS/1010, WCBS/880, the Drudge Report, the 10,000 other bloggers on the Internet, the Korean greengrocer on the corner, or wherever you get your reliable news.

I agree with that last assumption.

Did it ever occur to any of the partisans complaining about bias, either at CBS or Fox News, the current hot targets, that the basic problem is the concept of objectivity itself?

It’s usually an unperceived cultural clash between what we have been taught in civics classes to think of what journalists should be, and what various news media actually are. We are playing the classic game of left and right.
We erect an idealized standard that no one could possibly meet. And what we do is say you are not meeting the standard, therefore you are evil.

Objectivity in news is a delusion, a fantasy encouraged by news organizations as a shield from the slings and arrows of those who disagree with their version of the news.

The mere selection of what is news is unobjective journalism. “The CBS Evening News” the night of Sept. 23, for example, included stories on the coming election in the Free Republic of Iraq. They showed a montage of bombings, death and destruction. All of which can be construed as anti-Bush agitprop, as everybody against the war would agree. It makes the chances of a meaningful election look slim. Stories in the news budget that night on candidates flip-flopping and the debate on Social Security similarly could be misinterpreted.

The age of modern subjective journalism began with Walter Cronkite’s saying, “And that’s the way it is.” “That’s not the way it is,” Ayn Rand, Abbie Hoffman, Noam Chomsky and even Gus Hall could have said in the 1960s.

The emphasis on pseudo-objective journalism, now used as a marketing tool and seen as so annoying and pointless to some of us, is un-American in its way. The era of objectivity in journalism is relatively recent and of short duration. Before, say, the late 19th century, our journalists and media were unapologetically, almost instinctively, partisan. For anyone considering the subject, you might want to look at two new books, “The Tyranny of Printers”
by Jeffrey Pasley and Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications.” What we are seeing now in Fox News, you may be surprised to learn, is just an early Jacksonian newspaper translated to mass media.

There can be no such thing as objectivity. “Of all journalistic pretensions, that is the most hypocritical,” explained Geraldo Rivera in a brilliant lecture at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002, largely ignored by the objective media. “To suggest that alone among the human race we reporters have the unique ability to divorce from emotion with machinelike efficiency, cull not only the truth from fiction, but also fact from perception or opinion, is baloney. We all try to get the facts right. But all of us see things differently, whether it is because you’re standing over there and I’m over here, or personal experiences. We could look at the same event, both of us believing that we are being 100 percent professional and factual and call the story differently.”

Where do you stand, or sit, on the issue of objectivity? I once asked Don Hewitt, the founding father of “60 Minutes,” once the paragon of the best in TV journalism.

“You behold yourself to be objective,” he opined, “and you assume you are objective.”

Mulling all of this over, I began thinking, for argument’s sake, what would be so bad if Dan Rather came out of the closet as a far-left looney liberal
– as he’s already perceived on rabid talk radio. In this age of non-objective, opinionated journalism, who cares anymore whether news is “fair and balanced”? The majority of news sources certainly don’t.

Would the all-new hypothetically improved Dan Rather be any more of a threat to society than, say, a Sean Hannity?

It’s time we grew up and accepted the fact that all news is biased; only some is more biased than other. You take your pick. That is the great thing about freedom of the press.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.