[lbo-talk] reporters afraid of "liberal bias" (OBJECTIVITY IS NOT NEUTRALITY)

[bryan]

As the historian Thomas L. Haskell wrote in his article from History and 
Theory titled "Objectivity is not Neutrality" /(History and Theory/, 
Vol. 29, No. 2. (May, 1990), pp. 129-157.):

"The powerful argument is the highest fruit of the kind of thinking I 
would call objective, and in it neutrality plays no part. Authentic 
objectivity has simply nothing to do with the television newscaster's 
mechanical
gesture of allocating the same number of seconds to both sides of a 
question, or editorially splitting the difference between them, 
irrespective of their perceived merits." (p.136)

    http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-2656%28199005%2929%3A2%3C129%3AOINNRV%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3

Doug Henwood wrote:


> Los Angeles Times - September 5, 2004
>
> David Shaw:
> Media Matters
>
> "Reporters seem to think they've done an adequate job just because 
> they give both sides a chance to state their case," Lovelady says. 
> "But if that's all you do, you may have satisfied the imagined 
> constraints of objectivity, but often you haven't told the reader 
> anything.
>