So-called "objective" journalism is bad for democracy. Here's why:

I am truly sick of attacks on the media for being something more than mere transcriptionists for the powerful, but I've never seen a better summation of WHY that's a bad thing in a democratic society than this:

https://thecorrespondent.com/6138/wh...16940-eb6c348e

Quote:

...the word “objectivity” is usually understood in terms of its moral dimension. Journalists are expected to suspend moral judgment. They’re not supposed to say what they think. Yet this has never been an amoral business. On the contrary, journalism is moral through and through. It’s about what we as a society consider important, or should. All journalism, then, begins and ends with ideas about good and evil. The planet getting hotter isn’t news because it’s fact. The planet getting hotter is news because that’s a bad thing. Journalism is moral through and through. It begins and ends with ideas of good and evil If you order journalists to check their moral judgments at the door, one of two things will happen. Either they’ll have no clue what to report on and go home without a story, or they’ll figure it out in the only way possible: by letting others decide. In practice, that means becoming a mouthpiece for the establishment– the people with the power to decide what’s important, trivial, good, or bad. (Or, like the Dutch premier, to define what’s “normal” and what isn’t.) Objective journalism, defined as not taking a position or having an opinion, has become precisely the opposite of what it was originally intended to be. Today, it equates to unquestioningly repeating the opinions of the powerful. By leaving the position-taking to the public, we reduce our task as journalists to issuing press releases on behalf of elites. In short, we fail to fulfill our most basic duty.

The article goes into a lot more detail of the argument, but this is the heart of it, IMO.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3aHNYoH