Stick your knuckles out and then go sit in the corner for an hour and eat worms.
Leni
English 101 from time immemorial.....who, what, why, where and when as close to the top of the article or posting as possible.
That's what Big Journalism would like you to think. It's not "from time immemorial," it's from the Civil War era. Journalism as we know it scarcely existed before the advent (1848) of the Associated Press. In the Founding Era the newspapers were all a lot like the ones sponsored by Hamilton and Jefferson in which they waged partisan battles with each other. Papers were about the perspective of their printers. They were usually weeklies, and some didn't even have deadlines at all.But that doesn't mean that modern papers are less tendentious than those of the antebellum era; it means that modern newspapers have a lot of their tendentiousness hiding in plain sight. The planted axiom of journalism is that there is always a reason to meet the deadline. And there always is - but that reason has to do not with virtue or public good but rather the mere commercial interest of the printer.
Likewise, there is a reason for the position journalists take that all journalists are objective. That reason has nothing to do with the actual virtue of the least virtuous journalist - and everything to do with the fact that, through the mediation of the Associated Press, all "objective" journalists are in cahoots. In contradistinction to the newspaper of the founding era, the business model of the modern newspaper requires the printing of fresh news from a source to which the public is not privy - the AP. Thus, the business model of the modern newspaper requires that the public place its trust not merely in that newspaper's own reporters but in reporters working for other Associated Press newspapers nationwide.