Walker wrote: ↑Mon Dec 07, 2020 5:39 pm
* btw: I read that pushing a narrative is the new journalism being taught and demanded in the profession, and simple reporting of the facts has long gone the way of the dodo, thanks to Progressivism. And after reading that I thought … Duh.
You're right. Journalists are taught that objectivity is simply impossible, so we should not even aspire to have any. In fact, aspiring to be objective is taken as naive and pretentious, rather than what it really is -- the only ideal that keeps journalism on track at all; so that no matter how far short we may happen to fall of it, we must not abandon striving to approximate it better, and of using it to judge the biases of journalists and condemn them.
So instead, journalism prides itself on being rather overtly biased and "perspectival." Why shouldn't it? goes the reasoning...objectivity is an impossibility.
But here's the problem: journalism can't survive on being merely "perspectival" and subjective. That's because journalism always needs a fundamental organizing principle around which to centre its editorial decisions. How else are they going to know what's a "story" and what's not? Or how are they going to decide which "story" gets the lead, and which goes to the back pages, or isn't put out there at all? And how are journalistic organs like the NY Times going to hire and fire, praise and reject, and run their daily decisions without a value guiding all of that?
So the new answer is:
partisanship. Journalists now survive by demonstrating utility to the overlords by delivering the version of reality the overlords want to see...and manufacturing public consent.
They're doomed to become just massive propaganda factories, the likes of which would make Josef Goebbels rise up again to rub his hands together in glee.
