[Mb-civic] The Twilight Of Objectivity - Michael Kinsley - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Twilight Of Objectivity
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By Michael Kinsley
The Washington Post
Friday, March 31, 2006; A19

CNN's Lou Dobbs -- formerly a mild-mannered news anchor noted for his 
palsy-walsy interviews with corporate CEOs -- has turned into a raving 
populist xenophobe. Ratings are up. It's like watching one of those 
"makeover" shows that turn nerds into fops or bathrooms into ballrooms. 
According to the New York Times, this demonstrates "that what works in 
cable television news is not an objective analysis of the day's events" 
but "a specific point of view on a sizzling-hot topic." Nicholas Lemann 
made the same point in a recent New Yorker profile of Bill O'Reilly. 
Cable, he wrote "is increasingly a medium of outsize, super-opinionated 
franchise personalities."

The head of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, said that Lou Dobbs's license to 
emote is "sui generis" among CNN anchors, but that is obviously not 
true. Consider Anderson Cooper, CNN's rising star. His career was made 
when he exploded in self-righteous anger and gave Louisiana Sen. Mary 
Landrieu an emotional tongue-lashing about the inadequate relief effort 
after Hurricane Katrina. Klein has said that Cooper has "a refreshing 
way of being the anti-anchor . . . getting involved the way you might." 
In short, he's acting like a human being, albeit a somewhat overwrought one.

And now on CNN and elsewhere, you can see other anchors struggling to 
act like human beings, with varying degrees of success. Only five months 
before anointing Cooper as CNN's new messiah (nothing human is alien to 
Anderson Cooper; nothing alien is human to Lou Dobbs), Klein killed 
CNN's long-running debate show "Crossfire," on the grounds that viewers 
wanted information and not opinions. Klein said he agreed 
"wholeheartedly" with Jon Stewart's widely discussed and 
uncharacteristically stuffy remark that "Crossfire" and similar shows 
were "hurting America" with their occasionally raucous displays of 
emotional commitment to a political point of view.

But that is just a personal gripe (I worked at "Crossfire" for six 
years). More important is that Klein is right in sensing, on second 
thought, that objectivity is not a horse to bet the network on. Or the 
newspaper either.

The newspaper industry is having a psychic meltdown over the threat 
posed by the Internet. No one seriously doubts anymore that the Internet 
will fundamentally change the news business. The uncertainty is whether 
it will change only the method of delivering the product or will also 
change the nature of the product. Will people want, in any form, a 
collection of articles, written by professional journalists from a 
detached and purportedly objective point of view? Or are blogs and 
podcasts the cutting edge of a new model -- more personalized, more 
interactive, more opinionated, more communal, less objective?

It might even be a healthy development for American newspapers to 
abandon the conceit of objectivity. This is not unknown territory. Most 
of the world's newspapers, in fact, already make no pretense of 
objectivity in the American sense. But readers of the good ones (such as 
the Guardian or the Financial Times of London) come away as well 
informed as the readers of any "objective" American newspaper. Another 
model, right here in America, is the newsmagazine, all of which produce 
much outstanding journalism with little pretense of objectivity.

Opinion journalism can be more honest than objective-style journalism, 
because it doesn't have to hide its point of view. All observations are 
subjective. Writers freed of artificial objectivity can try to determine 
the whole truth about their subject and then tell it whole to the world. 
Their "objective" counterparts have to sort their subjective 
observations into two arbitrary piles: truths that are objective as 
well, and truths that are just an opinion. That second pile of truths 
cannot be published, except perhaps as a quote from someone else.

Without the pretense of objectivity, the fundamental journalist's 
obligation of factual accuracy would remain. Opinion journalism brings 
new ethical obligations as well. These can be summarized in two words: 
intellectual honesty. Are you writing or saying what you really think? 
Have you tested it against the available counterarguments? Will you 
stand by an expressed principle in different situations, when it leads 
to an unpleasing conclusion? Are you open to new evidence or an argument 
that might change your mind? Do you retain at least a tiny, healthy 
sliver of a doubt about the argument you choose to make?

Much of today's opinion journalism, especially on TV, is not a great 
advertisement for the notion that American journalism could be improved 
by more opinion and less effort at objectivity. But that's because the 
conditions under which much opinion journalism is practiced today make 
honesty harder, and doubt practically impossible.

Unless, of course, I am completely wrong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033001330.html?nav=hcmodule
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