I’ll be on PBS Newshour at 7p nyt talking about journalistic objectivity. I’ll be the guy with the wooden stake.
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June 18th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Hopefully you will be able to make the point that balance isn’t achieved by reporting one lie along with one truth and representing that as one for each side.
June 18th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Good luck! I don’t envy you, and it is easy for me to say, but I’d tell them that the concept of “objectivity” is a failed, 80+ year-old experiment resulting from an attempt to turn journalism into a science in the early 20th century, following the “Yellow Journalism” movement that reporters found so distasteful. Journalists were to pursue the “truth†and true solutions in public policy through the use of “objective†methods. But, this does not work because public policy rarely can be tested using scientific methods (e.g. repeatable laboratory experiments), and even if it could the public can have legitimate differences in their preferences. Moreover, the mere selection of a news story and angle reveals biases based upon what the reporter/editor thinks is important. It’s time to give-up the objectivity myth and go back to what Thomas Jefferson thought was the best way to arrive at the will of the people — a freewheeling competition in a marketplace of ideas. (Steve Boriss, The Future of News)
June 18th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Good job, Jeff, you were articulate, as always. I wrote about a few of your points here:
http://www.socialmedia.biz/2007/06/jarvis_3_ethics.html
June 18th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Jeff, you rocked online today. I agree with most of the things you had to say.
I think there is a good combination between the two stances you are the other guest presented. Somewhere between citizen journalism and ivory tower journalism and their perspectives and biases.
We are human, we cannot be completely impartial, and to deny that fact is to do a grave injustice to our entire audience and ourselves.
June 18th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
[...] watched Jeff Jarvis on Newshour. It was basically a reassertion that we have abandoned objectivity for transparency. Couldn’t [...]
June 18th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Well done. It was amusing, your co-persona in MA was evidencing her bias toward public interest without realizing it. Touchingly, she considered hers the ‘true’ news.
June 18th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Just watched your segment on the NewsHour — wow! I didn’t catch the name of the woman who was presenting the apparent counterpoint, but one particular statement she made was such a glaring contradiction to the point about “objectivity” that she was flogging, it left me dumbfounded.
Paraphrasing here: she made a statement about how “real journalists” do the best they can to present the stories that “THEY BELIEVE” are important. I do rather wish that you had beengiven the opportunity to jump on that quite singularly extraordinary statement.
If journalists’ BELIEFS are informing what they choose to report, how in the world is that “objective”? I think the absurdity of her argument was encapsulated right there in that one throwaway sentence.
In any case, you did very well in that compressed and limited format. I just wish you could have pointed out the glaring fallacy of that statement.
June 18th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
heard you on the newshour and strongly disagree with your position. ‘we report, you decide’. i feel journalists have an obligation to tell us the truth. the only unavoidable bias is in what to report in the time or space allotted, and therefore to choose what is being not reported. there is no opinion, and should not be when reporting how many of our soldiers lost their lives. what the reporter should be concerned with is not a selfish urge to comment, but to investigate whether or not they are reporting the truth and the whole truth. if the government is underreporting violence then it is the journalistic duty to uncover the truth. why are contractor deaths in iraq never reported, when there are over 120,000 of them there vs. 150,000 soldiers? ‘repeating is not reporting’. exposing corruption is a viewpoint, yes, but an objective one, it is neither liberal nor conservative. rush is not a journalist , except maybe to a crackhead - he is an entertainer as he himself states. fox cable news is the only network that derides a political party by name, while ignoring obvious and factual corruption and theft of our tax money by their ‘friends’ - yet they pass themselves off as ‘fair and balaced’. sorry, this just doesn’t pass the smell test. i saw you on the newshour, you do have a nose. i assume it wasn’t a clip-on.
June 19th, 2007 at 4:37 am
The one point that neither you nor the woman professor pointed out is that facts can be subjective. The words choosen to express that fact can be very biased. I recognized that in the first Gulf War in particular; the words chosen to describe the Allies and the words chosen to describe the Iraqis and their allies were very expressive of bias, perhaps unconscious, although I doubt it. And the words used in the runup to this mess of a war were much the same. They were not ‘facts’ but opinions masquerading as facts. It’s very hard anymore to get real ‘facts’ from any of the MSM so I have begun to rely on more and more variety of sources, including the Guardian and Independent in London. The explosion of media sources and voices has been a very good thing for me since I’ve lost most of my remaining respect for the MSM here in this country as nothing but mouthpieces. That’s not journalism.
Thank you for you insights and fascinating news of new and exciting developments in the expansion of the internet world. I can barely keep up with even the new terminology. It’s tough for this old dog to learn these new tricks.
July 23rd, 2007 at 4:42 pm
The other guest’s name was Callie Crossley.
Here’s the transcript: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june07/news_06-18.html