Journalists Dissing Objectivity

Jonathan Turley is concerned many people in the news media business now consider it a bad thing to be "objective." His article is titled, “'Objectivity has got to go.': News Leaders Call for the End of Objective Journalism."

We previously discussed the movement in journalism schools to get rid of principles of objectivity in journalism. Advocacy journalism is the new touchstone in the media even as polls show that trust in the media is plummeting. Now, former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward have released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”

Notably, while Bob Woodward and others have finally admitted that the Russian collusion coverage lacked objectivity and resulted in false reporting, media figures are pushing even harder against objectivity as a core value in journalism.

Those who claim that objectivity is impossible often advocate the vague notion of "social justice" as the only alternative. Just because objectivity is difficult is not a reason for giving up on trying to find common ground on many facts. Giving up on trying to describe things objectively opens the door to mob rule based on feelings of what justice requires, feelings that are unanchored to a mutually-shared understanding of what is going on. Giving up on objectivity is giving up on the Rule of Law. Throwing the quest for objectivity overboard is one of many modern-day examples of violating the principle of Chesterson's Fence, explained here by Shane Parrish of Farnam Street:

Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place. Chesterton went on to explain why this principle holds true, writing that fences don’t grow out of the ground, nor do people build them in their sleep or during a fit of madness. He explained that fences are built by people who carefully planned them out and “had some reason for thinking [the fence] would be a good thing for somebody.” Until we establish that reason, we have no business taking an ax to it. The reason might not be a good or relevant one; we just need to be aware of what the reason is. Otherwise, we may end up with unintended consequences: second- and third-order effects we don’t want, spreading like ripples on a pond and causing damage for years . . . Many of the problems we face in life occur when we intervene with systems without an awareness of what the consequences could be.

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Our Coopted Fourth Estate

Mike Solana, writing at Pirate Wires, describes "The Fifth Estate":

Dangerous alliance. In 1787, Edmund Burke said there were “Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there [sits] a Fourth Estate more important than they all." The notion of some vital power beyond our government was imported to the New World, and today constitutes a core belief of the American liberal: there is no free people, we’re often told, without a free press independent of congress, the courts, and our president. But throughout the 20th Century thousands of media outlets gradually consolidated, and by the dawn of our internet era only a few giants remained. These giants largely shared a single perspective, and in rough agreement with the ruling class the Fourth Estate naturally came to serve, rather than critique, power. This relationship metastasized into something very close to authoritarianism during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a single state narrative was written by the press, and ruthlessly enforced by a fifth and final fount of power in the newly-dominant technology industry.

It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.

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If Shadow-Banning and Censoring Twitter Accounts were Not Interesting or Consequential, Why were Twitter and the U.S. Government Doing These Things??

Pundits and "Journalists" keep claiming that the Twitter revelations to date are boring and amount to nothing of consequence. OK, then consider Colin Wright's comment:

. . . and why were they hiding that they were doing these things?

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How the People Expressed Themselves on Twitter

Twitter presented itself as a place where the People speak freely, but Twitter was playing a nefarious instrument. By hitting certain keys, Twitter shut down certain opinions. By hitting others, it opened up the floodgates. This makes it look like the People are speaking, but Twitter tilting the tables to make it look like the losers in many debates were the losers.

And I see that Matt Taibbi recently explained the importance of last night's revelations. These are not "Nothing Burgers," as the media elite try their damndest to shout into cyber-space. These hucksters will do their best to avoid addressing Taibbi's indictment head-on, I guarantee you. Here is one of many from Taibbi's writings today:

ELECTION INTERFERENCE? When @BariWeiss proved once and for all that Twitter does indeed engage in shadow-banning, or what they call “visibility filtering,” it was a significant step forward in our understanding of how internet platforms affect our perception of reality. In this batch of Slacks it’s unmistakeable that Donald Trump — whatever you think of him — was being “visibility filtered” even before the election. One of the first things new Twitter chief Elon Musk brought up with me was the question of whether or not Twitter interfered with elections. “For instance, is this candidate actually more popular than another, or did Twitter put a thumb on the scale?” he asked. Even these first document reviews make it pretty clear Twitter the company did do this. Again, it is very hard to look at these internal discussions and not conclude that the firm interfered with elections.

Now, what we don’t have (yet?) is proof that federal law enforcement or intelligence was heavily involved with electoral questions. We’ve seen individual reports filed from the FBI about smaller political accounts, and we have a sizable pile by now of communications showing that executives like Roth were in regular contact with those agencies. But so far these are just outlines. Nonetheless, they’re significant.

We now have plenty of evidence that those running Twitter and their allies in the elite media saw their job censoring dissent and feeding red meat to their niche audiences, thereby poisoning our conversations, often making them impossible. And doing it for advertising $. I'm reevaluating who is more excellent at hurting Americans for money, Journalists or Big Pharma?

I encourage readers to go to Taibbi's website to read more, following the link to his source materials on his website but mostly on Twitter.

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Matt Taibbi’s Commentary on the Tearing Down of Old Twitter and (Hopefully) its Rebirth

As I've expressed repeatedly on this site (but more often and with detailed substantiation on my website, Dangerous Intersection), I have no little respect for much of what passes as "journalism" at America's best known legacy media outlets. They have repeatedly preached to us and censored dissenting views on major stories instead of letting the facts fall where they may and inviting us to evaluate those facts on our own. That is why trust in major media is at an all time low: only 11% of us have a lot of confidence in our newspapers and television news. For years, Twitter has been the water cooler for those seeking to shape media narratives and jam them down our throat. That is changing and I am ever cognizant of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, along with the gaslighting, I am hearing from the increasingly disempowered "journalists" who have been the most active at censoring. I applaud the efforts of Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and others who are now revealing the many ways in which Twitter has been falsely presenting itself as a forum for free speech.

Today, Matt Taibbi posted background on the ongoing Twitter revelations. I expect that many people will appreciate these revelations but will not comment publicly (though many will applaud these development privately to me, as they have been doing for several years on many contentious issues). I also expect that more than a few people will publicly respond to Taibbi's comments (and my own) with a creative barrage of ad hominem comments--that's exactly what people do when can can't make honest arguments. Every time I see this behavior, I recognize it as stark symptoms of Nietzschean ressentiment. Here is an excerpt from Taibbi's most recent article, "Note to Readers on the "Twitter Files"":

A lot has been made about the line about how I “had to agree to certain conditions” to work on the story. I wrote that assuming the meaning of that line would be obvious. It was obvious. Still, the language was just loose enough to give critics room to make mischief, and the stakes being what they are, they of course did. That’s on me, and a lesson going forward. For the record, the deal was access to the Twitter documents, but I had to publish on Twitter. I also agreed to an attribution (“Sources at Twitter”). That’s it.

Everyone involved with the project, including myself as well as Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, has editorial control. We’ve been encouraged to look not just at historical Twitter, but the current iteration as well. I was told flat-out I could write anything I wanted, including anything about the current company and its new chief, Elon Musk. If anything, the degree of openness on that front freaked me out a little initially, being so far from any other experience I’ve had.

In our initial meeting, Musk talked about how he thought a “full confessional restores faith in the company,” and everything I’ve seen since seems to confirm he’s sincere about his desire for full open-kimono transparency with the public. He says we’re “welcome to look at things going forward, not just at the past,” and until I run into a reason to believe otherwise, I’m taking him at his word. I’d be crazy not to, considering the access we’ve already been given. This is a historic opportunity, and I think we’re all trying to treat that opportunity with the appropriate respect, which among other things means staying as focused as we can be on the documents, and trying to make as much sense of them as we can, as quickly as we can....

In this particular instance, the story has to come out on Twitter. There’s the obvious deep irony of using the familiar drip-drip-drip format and uncontrollable virulality of Twitter to roast Twitter itself. We’re also using an inherently destabilizing medium to expose efforts to turn Twitter into an authoritarian instrument of social control. There’s genius in this. Now I would feel wrong even thinking of doing it any other way.

This is especially the case since a major subtext of the Twitter Files project is what a burn it is on conventional/corporate media, whose minions tried for years to turn Twitter into a giant conformity machine, and cheered each new advance in censorship and opinion control. Those same people now have to watch in helplessness as one horrifying revelation after another spills out, guerrilla-style, into what was not long ago their private playground. This, too, couldn’t be scripted better. It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with.

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