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Stengel said. “But this notion that journalism is objective, or must be objective is something that has always bothered me – because the notion about objectivity is in some ways a fantasy. I don’t know that there is as such a thing as objectivity.”
excellent ping, PGalt.

An honest statement from the MSM at last!

Caveat Emptor applies far more to Time Magazine than it does for Exxon.

True, as far as it goes. But the actual issue of objectivity arose only with the advent of the Associated Press, which was by design a monopoly on the transmission of news via telegraph. It systematically crowded out and smothered competitors - and, naturally enough, was challenged as an unprecedented concentration of public influence in a single organization. The AP responded that it included newspapers of all points of view, so it was objective.
The first fallacy in that argument is of course that whoso takes his own objectivity for granted is by that very assumption the most subjective of men.
The second fallacy is that the famously independent voices of the various newspapers would or even could remain independent after they were associated. It was impossible for that to be true, because the AP transformed the business model of the newspaper business. In the founding era newspapers were openly partisan affairs, and - since in any event they had no news source which in principle their readers did not have independent access to, they typically went heavy on commentary and frank opinion - and most of them were weekly rather than daily affairs. That changed to a certain extent in the big cities which in about 1830 got high speed presses which were capable of very high volumes of production and therefore motivated newspapers to aim for a broader market than a highly idiosyncratic editorial perspective would be able to attract.
But the advent of the AP newswire put every AP newspaper in the business of reporting news which in principle their local public did not immediately have access to. That put every newspaper, and its readership, in the fog of breaking news. Say rather, the public had always been in a fog of very sparse information about the world outside the local area - and the newspapers suddenly had the ability to sell access to that outside world. But only on the terms of, not only the local newspaper itself, but of the Associated Press. If the AP didn't report a particular event, no newspaper remote from that event would even have the opportunity to report it. And even if the AP did report it, every newspaper was of course at liberty to either blare it out on a banner headline on the front page, bury it in the middle of the paper, or ignore it completely.
And lest there be any illusion that the AP was ever objective, the history of its relation with the Lincoln Administration puts paid to it. Because in the midst of the turmoil of the Civil War, the last thing the Lincoln Administration needed was the sort of journalism to which we have lately been so uncomfortably accustomed. It was all the administration could do to accomplish the mission in which it was immersed. To have simultaneously contended with the sort rolling PR assault which modern Republican presidents take as part of the territory - and which to his everlasting credit Ronald Reagan was able to overcome even as he whipped inflation, got the country going again, tamed the energy crisis, and transcended Communism - would have sunk the Union. Which was a near-run thing in any event, since General McClellan and his peace platform would have won the election of 1864 but for the Union battlefield successes of that year. Lincoln would not allow the Union to be sunk. So he coopted the AP, giving it favored access to the telegraph offices and to administration officials - in return for censorship, and self-censorship, of news inconvenient to the administration.
So the AP was scarcely out of its cradle when it was deeply enmeshed in the systematically tendentious reporting of the news. And the same sort of thing was endemic to the contemporaneous reporting of World War II. For example, the Roosevelt Administration censored the news of the fact that many hundreds of ships were lost to German U-boats in less than a year after Pearl Harbor - before the Navy had sunk a single U-boat. (None of which information was, of course, any secret to the Germans).
Certainly a case can be made in favor of the censorship which went on on both of those occasions - and, I doubt not, during WWI as well - but what is undeniable is that the same sort of self-censorship which occurred then is not in place now. It is not the bad news for the Bush Administration which is not reported, but the good news. Journalists have been falling all over themselves to emphasize the casualties of the Iraq occupation. Was it objective to emphasize the positive during "good" wars? If so, it cannot be objective to dote lovingly on Abu Graib and to emphasize the 1000th, the 2000th, the 3000th, and lately the 4000th death of US servicemen in Iraq.
Time is entirely within its rights to be an openly partisan magazine like National Review or The Nation. But it need not necessarily expect to have any more circulation than those publications, either. As to the general concept of journalistic objectivity, that is a patent fraud, and it could never be otherwise. But it is a fraud which has been supported by an unremitting propaganda campaign since the memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. Credence accorded to that fraudulent campaign against common sense amounts to a flaw in American culture.
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
The Market for Conservative-Based News