“Instead, modern journalism has attempted to create for itself a faux-scientific world, where facts are sacred, opinions are contaminants, and debate is a waste of time.”
Only, possibly, when I was a child and with increasingly less applications as each year has gone by were “facts” ever “sacred” to journalism and “opinions” held as “contaminants”.
Every front page report in the NYSlimes is no more than an editorial masquerading as “news”, and if any fact is allowed to appear in the text that would refute the editorial bent of the heading or subheading (rarely happens), it is mentioned as if in-passing and inconsequential, lest the opinion of the times be destroyed by the facts.
Understanding that as clearly as we do about modern journalism, I must dismiss the rest of the article as misguided, even if well intended.
Yet New York Times editor Kate Phillips seems to still treat opinions as contaminants as evidenced by her recent disclosure that, "I almost wish we could go back to the days when we never heard their voices."
“Instead, modern journalism has attempted to create for itself a faux-scientific world, where facts are sacred, opinions are contaminants, and debate is a waste of time.”Only, possibly, when I was a child and with increasingly less applications as each year has gone by were “facts” ever “sacred” to journalism and “opinions” held as “contaminants”.
Even if you are older than I (and me retired), I doubt that you are old enough to have seen the day when reality was sacred to journalism. Journalism is constantly selling the idea that journalism (that is, mere criticism of those who actually do things) is and not the doing of things, is what is important. Indeed the idea that journalism's interest is identical to the public interest is a planted axiom in much discussion by journalism.Every front page report in the NYSlimes is no more than an editorial masquerading as “news”, and if any fact is allowed to appear in the text that would refute the editorial bent of the heading or subheading (rarely happens), it is mentioned as if in-passing and inconsequential, lest the opinion of the times be destroyed by the facts.
Understanding that as clearly as we do about modern journalism, I must dismiss the rest of the article as misguided, even if well intended.
I can agree with you only to the extent that the writer should have included scare quotes in his sentence,Instead, modern journalism has attempted to create for itself a faux-scientific world, where "facts" are sacred, "opinions" are contaminants, and debate is a waste of time.In claiming to be objective, journalism effectively claims not only that everything it says is true, but that whatever it does not say is unimportant. We have all seen journalism putting forth "facts" which don't happen to be true - the salient example being the "Killian memos" which Dan Rather promoted as true documents from 1973 when they patently were created by Microsoft Word, almost certainly in 2004 but certainly much later than their putative dates of origin. So scare quotes around "facts" would certainly have been appropriate. But the really extensive tendentiousness of journalism lies in what journalism deems "not news."In light of the fact that
Half the truth is often a great lie. - Benjamin Franklin,what journalism does not say - which journalists themselves would freely admit is far more extensive than what they in fact do report - is presumptively of great significance. Journalists demand that we presume that what they do not report is not "a great lie," because they cannot prove that, and in the nature of things cannot possibly prove that negative. But the fact that something could not be proven true even if it were the gospel truth does not prove that it is in fact true. In fact it might be possible to prove it false.By claiming to be objective, journalists demand that we accept their "facts" - and their silences - as dispositive. They are claiming that debate is a waste of time because debating us is beneath them. And that is what the article was saying. It is an excellent article.