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Jeevan Asks You
MSNBC journalist Keith Olbermann is definitely a polarizing force, but I do admire his audacity and gumption. Just yesterday, Olbermann took on news reporting's sacred cow Ted Koppel for an op ed Koppel had placed in the Washington Post lamenting "the death of real news." In the op ed, Koppel takes Olbermann, among others, to task for representing his personal biases as objective reporting.Olbermann's rants are often just that, but you have to marvel at his word-smithing -- the man is almost Shakespearan in the way in which he puts down his detractors. Have a look at Olbermann's monologue where he defends his stance and questions the objectivity of those journalists who were lauded by Koppel for their reporting of "just the facts" here.
Is Olbermann right? Having heard some of those original broadcasts by Murrow and Cronkite, I would tend to agree that Olbermann's argument supports his theory that Koppel's heroes of objectivity were in fact rather biased, or selectively interpretive, at the very least. But in the spirit of hearing all sides of the argument, I would be eager to hear your views.
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Replies to This Conversation
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Permalink Reply by Maren Showkeir on -
Well, since you asked....
And since this is a topic close to my heart (and experience)...
Anyone who believes that journalists are objective or neutral — or ever were — is living in a dream world. The best a journalist can hope for is credibility, balance, and the time/space to explain the complexities of a story in a way people can understand. (And creating a slogan saying that is what you do doesn't cut it. You have to walk the talk.)
One thing that neither Cronkite and Murrow had to deal with was a 24-hour news cycle and the multitude of platforms we now have to disseminate information. (I would guess they also had more resources to gather/report the news, but I have no real data to back that up.) For me, this longing for the "integrity" of the past is a distraction and an illusion. For all that journalists might have got right back in the day, they also got plenty wrong (not to mention other issues such as lack of access, lack of diverse voices, etc. etc.)
I think Koppel and Olbermann both make good points, and I would love to see this sniping going on between them stimulate a rich national conversation. At this juncture of history, when anyone with a smart phone can both report the news and/or consume it, the old business model no longer serves. But the old journalistic model still should: Giving people credible, balanced information and helping them understand the complexities of a story.
Now, if only we could get more people to CARE about the complexities of a story! -
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Permalink Reply by David A. Schmaltz on -
Objectivity must be that peculiar delusion that one might have an observation without an observer. Olbermann avoids this delusion by being up front about his perspective by explicitly including himself as part of his observation. I believe the only way through this difficulty lies in explicitly claiming not "that's the way it is," but rather "That's how I see it from over here." Someone wiser than I'll ever be reflected that there could never be any such thing as non-fiction, since everything ever written got filtered through the writer first. Writers, not being anymore omniscient than any of the rest of us, can only report what they see, never how anything 'really' is.
The difficulty seems to be when we consumer of news reporting mistake it for 'the way it is.' Messengers are always popular targets. Maybe we should just shoot them all and keep swallowing. -
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