The palest form of the scientific method meets the poorest application of art. That’s basically how I view my hallowed life’s work, journalism.
It is what it is, no cause to put on airs hustling after what I wholeheartedly believe is the highest, most sacred of quests. Well, in a secular sense. My very name is halfway to Quixote if I doubt my windmills.
I’ll include commentary — such as this weekly column — as consistent with the grand tilt. There’s no pretense of news story objectiveness, sure, but opinion pieces in their corner of the paper submit to the rules of evidence and conceits of craft just the same.
Every paper has such an opinion section, and the entirety of news and culture magazines is commentary at root. Read any copy or online edition of Wired, The New Yorker, Atlantic, Time, The Economist, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, et al. All commentary, every inch, and it’s all of the highest order of journalism, too.
“Objectivity” in any scientific sense is beyond humans in even the truest of true stories. Artificial intelligence won’t change that, curated by and produced for humans.
Random facts pulled from a raffle wheel might be objective, depending on what facts were fed in to pick out. That can’t be journalism, though.
Journalism is about deriving meaning and context from facts and evidence. There can be nothing objective about it.
That’s why propaganda, PR and Fox News are such close cousins to the real deal. Like other obscenities, you know ’em when you see ’em, to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s struggle in 1964 for a definition of smut.
Stories are shaped by the sources. Some documents are accessible to the public, and plenty are not. Some officials answer questions, some don’t. Some lie, just part of the puzzle. Simply the nature of talking to this source and not that one twists the result. A viewpoint or set of facts is amplified while another gets no air.
The journalist can’t help but shape a story most of all, and I don’t mean the propagandist or activist at heart. I mean the most skilled, straight-up truth seeker, going only where the facts lead, bearing pure witness. Their order of facts, what they tossed out, who they quoted or didn’t, their themes, the point of their story — none of that is objective. It can’t be.
Writers bring their baggage, and readers bring theirs to every story. We’re inescapably human, and no human has ever been or ever will be … objective. Not in this.
Oh, it’s a fine ideal. I go for objective even knowing this isn’t possible to achieve or even what a reader really wants. In our genre, the reader seeks a story — stakes, a quest, a beginning, middle and end — that also happens to be true and adds to their knowledge of the world.
Cynically, I might observe that’s not necessarily true, either. Plenty want only what rings true in that shocking “I can’t believe it!” and ultimately satisfying way that fools them into thinking they understand their world. But that’s a whole ‘nother column topic, one about mistaking social media for news, heat for light, comfort for wisdom.
I can’t promise objectivity, no human can. Ah, but we can be fair minded. I can be fair-minded and open as I report and write. You can be fair minded in reading. Together we can generate value out of a story, whether news or commentary.
The doesn’t mean we have to agree on our conclusions, though. How boring would this world be if we always did?
In a way, our stories and columns are arguments in a classic sense. Here is what the writer found, arranged in a reasonably logical and artful way. A reasonable reader, reasonably free of prejudicial taints — NIMBYism, partisanship, worse — considers the argument and forms their own conclusions from the story and other knowledge, maybe from other stories, maybe from direct experience.
That’s the ideal, and the spirit we bring to our work at The Park Record, trusting that the largest share of readers brings the same to the reading.
In this way, even though none of us can be objective, only fair-minded, the alchemy between our work and your reading strengthens our community at large.
Sure, Quixotic. But I earnestly believe in the truth of it.
Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.