Objectivity isn’t meant to be a destination in the sense that it’s a place that one’s reporting can arrive at. It’s meant to be a process, one that can never be executed perfectly, but one that has the effect of improving the final product over what it would otherwise be.
As for your question, “when did WWII start?” The answer is that it’s an objective fact that there are a number of events that arguably mark the beginning of the war, all of which have varying degrees of merit. Complexity, or the fact that there is no one right answer to a given question, doesn’t mean that we have to throw out any effort at objectivity. It just means that we have to dig deeper.
Objectivity isn’t meant to be a destination in the sense that it’s a place that one’s reporting can arrive at. It’s meant to be a process, one that can never be executed perfectly, but one that has the effect of improving the final product over what it would otherwise be.
Agreed. The thing is you get this but most people don’t. The right literally says “the biased media won’t cover that” they don’t even say “liberal bias” anymore. Fox News puts a lot of energy into saying they are “just the facts.“ It is seen as a moral good to be objective and factual, and “those other guys are biased.“ There’s this erroneous idea that news and history and such are supposed to be objective that is deeply internalized in the US.
Let me put it another way. This is how the current discourse goes:
“That article is biased therefore we should throw it out.”
What it should be instead is accounting for the bias, acknowledging it, and using it to contextualize the contents. It’s classic throwing baby out with the bath water. Except it’s incredibly deliberate and based on a moral imperative that does not make sense.
Objectivity isn’t meant to be a destination in the sense that it’s a place that one’s reporting can arrive at. It’s meant to be a process, one that can never be executed perfectly, but one that has the effect of improving the final product over what it would otherwise be.
As for your question, “when did WWII start?” The answer is that it’s an objective fact that there are a number of events that arguably mark the beginning of the war, all of which have varying degrees of merit. Complexity, or the fact that there is no one right answer to a given question, doesn’t mean that we have to throw out any effort at objectivity. It just means that we have to dig deeper.
Agreed. The thing is you get this but most people don’t. The right literally says “the biased media won’t cover that” they don’t even say “liberal bias” anymore. Fox News puts a lot of energy into saying they are “just the facts.“ It is seen as a moral good to be objective and factual, and “those other guys are biased.“ There’s this erroneous idea that news and history and such are supposed to be objective that is deeply internalized in the US.
Let me put it another way. This is how the current discourse goes:
“That article is biased therefore we should throw it out.”
What it should be instead is accounting for the bias, acknowledging it, and using it to contextualize the contents. It’s classic throwing baby out with the bath water. Except it’s incredibly deliberate and based on a moral imperative that does not make sense.