Sherry Chandler » Truth, Balance and the News
Truth, Balance and the News
Back during the debates leading up to the disastrous 2000 election, I learned that Jim Lehrer did not vote in any election. He didn’t want to lose his objectivity by making a choice of candidate. I felt as outraged as though I’d been told there was no Santa Claus. I had always thought The News Hour was the pinicle of television news. But a good citizen has to make choices, a good citizen votes. A journalist should be a good citizen. And a journalist should have a bullsh*t detector. “Journalism is not stenography,” to quote Jeffrey Dworkin of NPR.
Over at Open Source, you can now find the mp3 file for their broadcast of June 14th, discussing questions of objectivity and truthtelling in the main stream media, Truth, Balance, and the News. It is also a discussion about how the main stream media shapes itself in the era of bloggers and the kind of pressure the blogosphere is putting on newspapers and broadcast journalists to find, not balance, but truth.
Joining the discussion are Jeffrey Dworkin, ombudsman for NPR; Jay Rosen, Professor of Journalism at NYU, Brent Cunningham, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, and William Powers, columnist for the National Journal.
It’s a sort of insiders discussion but one that’s important to us all. I’m not sure they came to any conclusion that changed anything. But the discussion was free-ranging and frank about subjects like the incompetence of the disaster-response to Katrina and the fact that the country has no real idea why it went to war in Iraq.
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