How objectivity in journalism became a matter of opinion
&gt; “ Over 500 at the Washington Post endorsed demands for “combating racism and discrimination” at the paper.“<p>I’ve always viewed journalism as a career as something very, very similar to a hated defense attorney.<p>A defense attorney’s job is to set aside all personal beliefs, moral points of view on racism, violence, inequality, whatever, and execute the best possible legal defense for a client.<p>The attorney may utterly hate rapists, but may also be highly skilled at defending them in court because the civic function of requiring evidence and due process to lead to a legal standard of a guilty verdict is an even greater moral requirement for society than punishing someone accused of crimes which elicit outrage.<p>It’s similar for a journalist. Your job is to set aside all beliefs about what’s right or wrong and do the best job of executing a record of eye witness observations, quotations and facts that give a holistic view of every story. If any component of your own preferences for social movements or causes has come through, you’ve failed badly.<p>But it seems like society is pressuring for journalism to go the other way, and largely academia too. You cannot dispassionately pursue analysis of facts and observations. You <i>must</i> color them with a definitive edge or stance that injects an active agenda based on the prevailing moral opinions of whatever in-group your employer belongs to (usually left vs right in America).<p>Journalists have some extreme self-aggrandizing view that their function is to carry out missions of morality or causes and to “do good” with their journalism. It leads to editorializing both what is newsworthy in the first place and also what discourse is allowed to be had about it.<p>I personally think it’s really frightening. If journalists at our most major institutions believe their work should pursue an agenda like combating racism, that’s horrific.<p>Racism is deplorable and despicable. Journalism ceasing to be an unglamorous job about executing observatory faculties to let others draw conclusions for themselves is cosmically worse, in the exact same way that rape is deplorable and despicable, but a situation where defense attorneys view it as their job to railroad people accused of rape without executing their best possible legal defense is cosmically, immeasurably far worse.