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jwarrenw13 -> RE: Lol Developer gets banned by Steam.... (6/12/2017 4:31:53 PM)
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This comment is not going to be political, though it may sound like it to some. I'm speaking professionally, not politically. If it is taken a something political, I apologize.
The ideal of objective journalism in the United States is dead. My university degree is in newspaper journalism, 1977. At that time I was taught that there were two important qualities of objectivity in journalism. First was, obviously, be objective and neutral. Do not let your pre-existing opinions interfere with your reporting. Get all sides of a story and report objectively and as accurately as possible. Second was that the press had a natural adversarial role regarding government. That may seem to partially contradict the first point. But the point was that reporters were to be naturally skeptical of government. This dynamic was established in the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution which guaranteed a free press. Free from what? From government control or interference or censorship of course. After all, the Bill of Rights is at its simplest a list of limitations on the government. Read the First Amendment. " CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The press is protected from government interference and control. This adversarial relationship with government reflects the First Amendment.
That doesn't mean that the press has to always attack the government. Objectivity would be writing about the good things the government does as well as the bad. But it would not mean cozying up with a certain political party or individual due to political beliefs or attacking another party or individual due to political beliefs.
In America today we simply have to look at the cable news networks to see how this has broken down. During the Obama administration we had two of the major cable news networks in full support of Obama and one in opposition. Today we see the opposite with the Trump administration, two in full attack mode and one in support mode. The reporting was not objective during the Obama administration and is not today in the Trump administration.
During my too long life I worked a couple of years as a newspaper reporter for a small regional US daily newspaper and got to see things from that side. The last part of my military career I worked in what the US Army calls public affairs. You might call it public relations or something worse, though I never lied to a reporter and was never supposed to lie. "I can't comment on ongoing operations" is not a lie, for example. If lies were told, they were left for the people wearing suits in Washington. I got to see reporting from the other side. I got to see reporters from US national media, for example, do stories that had nothing to do with facts but that were entirely expressing a pre-existing point of view. I have some stories I could tell about that regarding my few encounters with natonal network reporters, but I won't here. This would have been the late 80s and early 90s, a long time ago.
When I was a newspaper reporter, I never went into a story with a point of view. I went into a story trying to report the facts as best I could, no matter where the facts led me. And I was young and naive enough to believe that this is the way it should be. There are not too many reporters like that in major media any longer. TV drives everything. Ratings drive TV. You can tell how a specific network will report a story based on which network it is. And people turn to the sources that support and reinforce their already existing views. Truth is lost.
I believe if you want to find objective reporting, you mainly have to look on line for it. But there is so much crap on line, as noted above, that it is hard to find objectivity. There is a lot of bad stuff out there, but if you keep an open mind and read a variety of sources, even ones you know are biased, you can begin to see a glimmer of the truth sometimes. For example, every morning I watch a little of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. I know that none of those three are objective, but there is a truth there if you listen to all of them skeptically and then do a little filtering.
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