The question is, do you think a person CAN be an objective observer of an event, and objectively report it?
If not, it doesn’t really matter where the information comes from. If yes, then the question is can anybody do it, or does it require a skill and time and effort which is best obtained by paying someone to do the job?
I believe that if I was sent to an event, I could satisfactorily provide the objective truth of the occurances at that event. But if nobody else would believe me unless “they were there themselves”, it doesn’t matter if I could do so or not.
There was a time that we trusted journalists to faithfully report what happened, and to keep opinion and bias in the analysis pieces. Not any more, and I thik that’s a loss because as an opinion columnist, I am dependent on SOMEONE getting the truth and reporting it.
I have LITTLE trust of the internet “reporters”. They aren’t paid, they aren’t edited, they have no checks and balances. They MIGHT be truthful, but if they aren’t there’s nobody to call them on it or fix it.
There was a time when news couldn’t be too biased because if you learned it you’d drop them. Now we seem to ENJOY bias, so long as it’s for our side. I personally fault ANY reporter, right or left, who can’t give me the facts. I hate writing an opinion and finding out the facts I based the opinion on were not accurate or complete.
Maybe originally (but probably not) reporters just reported on an event without influencing that event — but if you’re really paying attention, they distort the event so greatly that the real subject for that reporting becomes secondary to the reporter’s own spin — or what they would like the public to think in their noble, selfless quest for the Pulitzer/Nobel prize.
Of course I believe any person can be objective — and should be trained to be so as the very basis of modern education, rather than just regurgitating the “facts” as they have been taught up to now — which is also why modern education is increasingly irrelevant and useless.
Most people now have the tools to discover the truth of anything for themselves — as their primary source of truth — and not relying on somebody to do it for them, as their primary source of information. One of the disastrous indoctrinations of the last century was the increasing professionalization, specialization, categorization and fragmentation of understanding so few would venture out of their own comfort zone and area of expertise.
Now, that venturing out is done routinely by people because they are empowered to do so by generalized data processing tools — which allows them to understand most things without becoming experts and learning the jargon that excludes all but a few. This is the major “news” story the news people don’t want us to know about — happening in every life, and what every individual needs to discover for themselves, as the evolutionary development of these times.