RoR: Forum

Good Morning Dr. Machon,

I'm so pleased someone has paid tribute to David Brinkley. As youngsters my daughters had goldfish whom they named Chet and David and said good night for many nights. As an adult I watched This Week faithfully -- while everyone else went to church. But I continued watching This Week long after David Brinkley retired, even after getting more and more annoyed with it. I'd even forgotten David. Sadly I was reminded how I got hooked once the news of his demise was aired.

It was doubly sad that day as Gregory Peck was gone as well. Yes, I loved him as an actor and was pleased with the t.v. obits. But what about David? Except for the announcement, I saw none. Thank you for your tribute Dr. Machon plus the reality check on objectivity.

So long, gentlemen.
Jane Yoder

Post 1

Thursday, June 26, 2003 - 10:29pm

As, in my day job, a political journalist based in my country's Parliament, I have long since given up trying to explain that "objectivity" & "neutrality" are two different things. In this anti-conceptual age you just get glazed eyes in response. Brinkley was of the old school that was conceptually literate *and* had *integrity* - increasingly rare in a line of activity more & more driven by Political Correctness. He was a class act, who oozed decency.

Post 2

Monday, February 9, 2004 - 9:19pm

Dear Tibor,

I have given a great deal of thought to this topic and I was very interested to read your thoughts. I will be looking up the chapter you mention in the column.

I think you are giving short shrift to the notion of the possibility of a neutral point of view. Please see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view

for a statement, for which I am mostly responsible, of Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" policy.

I am thinking of developing the thoughts in that article into an article for publication. I would love to talk to you about it. My e-mail address is blarneypilgrim (a t) yahoo (d o t) com.

By the way, we met briefly probably 10 years ago, at Oberlin. I've since earned my Ph.D. in philosophy and am now on the job market after taking a long break from academia.

--Larry Sanger

Post 3

Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - 10:09pm

Thank You, Tibor

I remember the hardest I ever laughed while watching the news was listening to this brilliant man tell people in such urbane and erudite language what nonsense they were being told by what criminals, and what fools they were for believing it. I will never forget him saying during the '96 campaign just how damn "boring" Bill Clinton was. No one seemed to get it, they were shocked he said it. But he was right, once you've heard one liar, you've heard them all. I'd have given an ear to give him another ten years on the air. I mourned his retirement and I mourned his passing, and since I see mourning as a celebration, I thank you now, Tibor, for the tear you have brought to my eye.

Ted Keer, 13 December, 2006, NYC

Post 4

Wednesday, December 13, 2006 - 8:38am

This was quite interesting. I don't have many memories of Brinkley myself. He seems to be quite honest about journalistic objectivity. I also wonder if it is possible.

Post 5

Thursday, February 14, 2013 - 5:42pm

Although Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were part of my culture growing up, neither one affected me much. So, I will not pass judgment on Brinkley.

On the problem of journalistic objectivity, I insist that as presented here by Tibor Machan, David Brinkley is correct. "Objectivity" does not mean getting the facts of time and place right. "Objectivity" (so-called) is not just spelling people's names right. Objectivity in journalism would mean not letting your personal beliefs influence your reporting. That is easy enough when you are sent to a fire -- and even that is problematic: what is the cause of the fire? Was the building up to code? Was it arson? Did the fire department respond at their best?

It is a bit harder when your beat is city hall. Every adjective conveys nuance of meaning.

Suppose that the mayor believes that city employees deserve a raise. City council resists. Each of them wants to spend the money on parks improvements because collectively their constituents will benefit from that, but no council rep has a large number of city employees in their district. Maybe you can be objective... if you do not care about the issue... If you do care, then you will unavoidably choose this word over that. If you remain "objective" then it means that you do not really care one way or the other. That is the disinterested - disembodied - "Platonic" view.

In science, the researcher has no personal stake in the outcome. True, a researcher may have a theory to be advanced and that can - and does - influence the work and the reporting. But that is what peer review is for.

And in journalism, we have peer review also. It is called competition for news. Hearst versus Pulitzer; PBS versus Fox. InfoWars versus the World. Huffington Post is not objective. Rather, they proudly - and profitably - offer a multiplicity of non-objective newses. You must decide.

The so-called theory of journalistic objectivity came from the Columbia School of Journalism. Flush with a ton of money from Joseph Pulitzer, they set about enacting their progressivist agenda. They effectively ended the era of capitalist ("yellow") journalism of which Joseph Pulitzer was a successful practitioner, going head-to-head against William Randolph Heart, who also was villfied.

The progressivist theory was that you, as the poor stupid reader, would not need to evaluate the facts, to compare and contrast, to seek the truth, but could rely passively as a "consumer" on the (ahem) "objectivity" of professional journalists who would tell you what to believe.

In the heyday of "yellow" (profit-driven) journalism, New York had seven daily newspapers. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland... Buffalo, Indianapolis, Cedar Rapids... Every city had competing viewpoints in print. In high school, I had a journalism teacher who wrote the Entertainment column first for one paper, then the other. Competition impels to excellence. Growing up in Cleveland in the 1950s, we knew that thePress was Democratic and the Plain Dealer was Republican. We still read the Press (occasionally) because in a free society, the loyal opposition keeps you honest.

Read about Nellie Bly who beat Phileas Fogg by eight days. She also risked her safety and her life by pretending to be insane and being committed an asylum to reveal the abuses suffered by those condemned. What would "objective" reporting be? "We are warm and dry and fed daily. We are also beaten and raped daily. We take the good with the bad."

If journalism were chemistry or physics, it might be dispassionate. If you care about the world you live in, you write from the heart.

Of course you get the facts right.

Ludwig von Mises said that capitalists and socialists agree on the facts, that at a certain time and place, a given commodity had some price. What they disagree on is what the facts mean. Therein lies the inherent and appropriate lack of so-called "objectivity" in journalism.

PS. By the standards of Columbia School objectivity, President Obama means well and is trying hard to do a good job.

PPS: I had six semesters of journalism over four years of high school. I served on my college newspaper for two years. I have been a paid freelance writer since 1973 and an editor 2004-2006.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 2/14, 6:13pm)

Post 6

Thursday, February 14, 2013 - 7:41pm

Strangely enough, being an objective news reporter means being passionate where that is what is felt and is appropriate to the story, but other times it means reporting the who/when/what/why facts in such a way that no-one could ever tell how you personally feel about them. And it means that the person needs to be very clear and obvious when they are editorializing and when they are reporting. Clear on what they are putting forth as a fact, or a reasonable conjecture, versus an opinion. The person isn't expected to be neutral, but they are expected to make neutral reports where appropriate.

When people say that it is impossible for any reporter to totally separate their personal viewpoint and values from what they are reporting, that might have some very very, small element of truth but it is trotted out to justify people who not only don't try to make a separation, but actually attempt to smuggle their view in as hidden propaganda. That is a world of a difference.

So, I'd say that the first law of objective journalism is to understand that the goal of reporting is to never push your personal view as a hidden aspect of the story. And that if there is some degree to which your personal views sneak into the reporting choices made, even accidentally, that is the degree of unprofessionalism being displayed.

Those stories where the display of the reporters personal values are appropriate, the only call is that they be authentic, out in the open, and not intended to manipulate the audience for an agenda other than the direct impact of the story itself. In that story Michael mentioned where inmates are beaten and raped daily, it would be reasonable to assume that everyone in the audience who isn't a sadist or masochist will understand the horror of that and it would be strange to report that with the same intonations as the daily weather report.

Nothing wrong with writing from the heart when it is not being done manipulatively - like it is, for example, in many of the reports on Sandy Hook where some talking head is not reporting so much as using the bloody bodies of little children to manipulate people into ignoring the second amendment. That's not speaking not from the heart, and certainly not objective journalism, but smuggling propaganda into the minds of the views, disguised as reporting.
-----------------

On the topic of reporting, there is an excellent C-Span video from 1993 where Michael Crichton criticizes the media. Very much worth a look despite the age.

Here are a few quotes (which might not be word perfect):

"Increasingly people see no difference between the narcissistic, self-serving news people asking questions and the narcissistic, self-serving politicians who aren't answering them."

"Let us set aside for a moment the idea that bias is in the eye of the beholder of the news, as much as it is in the pen or the sound bite of the media, and focus instead on the quality of the product."
(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 2/14, 7:49pm)

Post 7

Friday, February 15, 2013 - 11:20am

Steve:

Enjoyed the Crichton talk/interview.

We're 20 years past his observations. My impression is, in exactly the same way that TV and Radio never met its promise in practice, so is the case with the internet.

In some ways, we've just blown by his lament, and accept the new norm of journalism as inherently opinion/agenda based.

I don't remember the last time I watched network news. OTOH, I've got little regard for the selective headlines skimmed by something like Google News. The new technology is abused as much as the old technology. If anything, the abuse of information is far worse today than it was even in '93. The technology just amplifies the abuse.

Maybe it's an improvement; we don't implicitly trust any source these days. We sift through the crap and pull out the peanuts we like.

regards,
Fred

Post 8

Friday, February 15, 2013 - 12:08pm

Fred,

I really liked Crichton and was sorry to see him go. I thought he was very sharp in his identification of those media trends, and he articulated them so well. I particularly enjoyed the fact that he was doing so at the National Press Club :-)

I agree with you that we have blown past his descriptions, and that the technology, which continues to astonish, is not meeting the promise it should in application.

That call for intelligent news sourcing that he predicted seems to have been delayed in coming... still not here... and perhaps it is because the culture is dumbing down at great speed, without regard for technology improvements and that blunts the market edge for intelligent use of the technology. Instead of the extraordinary, high quality, personalized, in-depth news presentation services we got Facebook, Google News, Huffington Post, and Christian Mingling dating sites :-(

Post 9

Saturday, February 16, 2013 - 7:34am

The National Press Club blurb was yet another example, calling Crichton the author of Jurassic Park, when in fact, he wrote more, and held both an MD and a JD. His 1983 book Electronic Life was about many of the same issues and it was based on that that I obtained Fred Cohn's master's thesis which explained how Conway's Game of Life could be made into self-replicating computer programs. Then we got all these viruses... the Morris Worm, and all that... but this week, both my Macintosh and my PC received automatic updates from Adobe.

Much of what he said was just plain wrong. He was complaining. Some of what he said was insightful, and seems to have gone over your heads. You can do what he predicted, get a spider to crawl the web for you finding the news you want. If you cannot program one, you can get someone to do that for you. (Or do you want the best news free, like in the days of Huntley-Brinkley when broadcast TV was three free national networks, not thousands of channels by subscription.) You can watch CSPAN and CSPAN-2 all day long. You can get them on yoru computer.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote six articles about "electronic government" about online access to legislative databases, most of which were private services. Then, the governments opened up. Finally, I stopped when I heard on NPR, Newt Gingrich announcing the THOMAS system of the Library of Congress. You can get all the government news you want... if that is what you want.

I have several techie news links on my Favorites. My wife and I got new Slash-Dot tshirts (tax free) at a recent 15th anniversary party. I also read from Gizmodo, DVice, and Science Daily. For that matter, I make the rounds of the Austrian blogs, Unbroken Window, Cafe Hayek, EconLog.

Your prejudice against Christians prevents you from seeing that Rebirth of Reason is just another example of the same thing: people meeting people online. (Before you guys showed up, some people held SOLO Meetups and I believe that we did have one romance... oh, two: Mike and Kat, of course...) But, hey, when Wagner was conducting Lohengrin, other people were clapping to Stephen Foster's blackface antics. Popular culture is what it is. We study Aristophanes as a "classic" but it was lowball screwball comedy for its time. The man wants to learn polite manners. OK, what finger do you point with? "When I was young, I used this one!" (har har har)

Life is still good. You just got old.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 2/16, 7:39am)

Post 10

Saturday, February 16, 2013 - 10:18am

Michael,

Your prejudice against Christians prevents you from seeing that Rebirth of Reason is just another example of the same thing: people meeting people online.

I don't have a 'prejudice' against Christians. I stand along side of them in a number of critical issues: Personal responsibility, absolute moral values, universal moral values, and volition. I'm opposed to the their views in the areas of faith and sacrifice and all of the nonsense derived from building practices out of blind faith in scripture - like theism. And your statement that I don't see Rebirth of Reason as an example of people meeting people is silly. Look at my post again and you'll see that I was making a completely different point. And, by the way, Michael, I did get old, but I'm happy to say that my life has gotten better and better.

Post 11

Saturday, February 16, 2013 - 1:45pm

Michael:

re: I have several techie news links on my Favorites. My wife and I got new Slash-Dot tshirts (tax free) at a recent 15th anniversary party. I also read from Gizmodo, DVice, and Science Daily. For that matter, I make the rounds of the Austrian blogs, Unbroken Window, Cafe Hayek, EconLog.

That was much more elegantly stated than "We sift through the crap and pull out the peanuts we like."

regards,
Fred

Post 12

Sunday, February 17, 2013 - 1:27am