David T. Z. Mindich

I like to come back to the history of journalism from time to time. It's just one of those areas where it's easy to get exasperated with the state of the business now and get romantic about the way things were. But like most romances, the longed for days of noble journalism reside in our imaginations, not history. It's good to be reminded that the sins and follies of modern industry aren't the exception, but the rule. For perspective.

For his part Mindich walks his reader through the development and implementation of several strategies adopted in the persuit of that holy grail, objective journalism. This included things like detachment, non-partisanship, the inverted paramid, facticity and balance. These characteristics can be identified and tracked, but objectivity itself is far trickier to identify and define.

While the reader mostly sees improvement in the journalism as these techniques are introduced at the no point do we see true objectivity. Some come closer to the ideal than others, but those scare quotes around "Objectivity" on the coveer of the book are no accident. As it goes with ideals, objectivity itself is almost certainly unattainable. The virtue is in the pursuit of the ideal, the trap in thinking we ever have or ever will attain it. Chew on this for a minute it:

"Newpapers and wire services had embraced "objectivity" and the idea that reality lies between competing truth claims. But the idea that the world can be seen without human filters is, of course, problematic. For example, the New York Times and other papers attempted to "balance" their coverage of lynching: on the one hand lynching is evil, on the other hand 'Negroes are prone' to rape."

So you see, while there are steps one can use in pursuit objective writing, the genuine article is not something that can be produced by a simple application of rules. Readers and writers both are human and have a limited number of perspectives and interpretations with which we struggle to define a truth that transcends both. So as a reader, maybe don't fetishize or romanticize objectivity so much. Just put on your critical thinking hat and do the best you can.… (mehr)