Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Television (and print, but they've been cut off by the layout of the blog for some reason) reporters take a statement from a police information officer at the scene of a shooting. Photograph by Justin Baker

"With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms." - Hunter S. Thompson

In any journalism class, from the one I took in high school on up through university level, the idea that you have to STAY OBJECTIVE gets hammered in with the force of a Mack truck plowing over a poodle. Use neutral language! Avoid bias at all costs!

Bull. Shit.

Humans are biased creatures. Everything you see gets interpreted through a lens of your own past experience and everything you think gets filtered back out through the same. True objectivity is a simple impossibility.

"But shouldn't we try? Is it not a noble goal?"

Fuck no it isn't.

Everything you do and say and write is going to be biased. Every choice you make about what is newsworthy and what facts are worth putting into the article and what photo is best to accompany it is being biased by your personal filter and by the filters of your editors and publishers and the business as a whole. No matter how carefully you choose neutral words to express your thoughts, the thoughts themselves are not, and can never be, neutral themselves.

Misleading yourself into thinking that you're some kind of bastion of integrity and journalistic objectivity is bad enough. Misleading the public into thinking that journalism is objective is even worse. When "Objective Journalism" is deified and believed in with the fervency of a Born-Again who thinks Jesus Christ Himself is actually literally present with him in his bed at night when he's piously keeping himself from masturbating, the general public starts to think that every news source - or even just the ones they like the best, which is as bad or worse - is Actually Telling The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth. They think they can trust the news to get The Whole Story. In cases where the bias is evident - Fox News' obvious right-wing slant, for instance - the tendency is to think that the one the viewer agrees with is Objective and the others are Bad Journalism.

It's ALL Bad Journalism, if "Biased" means "Bad."

You can't keep yourself unbiased and pretending you are is a disservice to yourself and the readers. What the industry needs is an open acknowledgement of it. Let there be right-wing news and left-wing news and libertarian news. The people with tiny little brains who can't deal with opposing viewpoints can just read the one they agree with; the people who want to actually try and figure out what's really going on can read all of them and form their own idea of what constitutes The Objective Truth that way.

And I dare say you'll write better and enjoy it more if you're not constantly keeping yourself on that self-imposed leash of impossible goals.

Now get the fuck out there and write what you believe in. Write what you're angry about. Write what you feel. WRITE, you fuckers.

Don Henley - Dirty Laundry (website)
New Pornographers - The Fake Headlines (website)
Spoon - I Turn My Camera On (website)