It has long been held that our news is solely objective, as if the chroniclers of our public story are mere stenographers, telling us what happened, and why.
This was always a fiction, of course, a tenet that came of age in the mid-19th century because advertisers—not readers, mind you—objected to point of view. Even as the news industry quaked, it was taken as a matter of faith that the practice of delivering the news had to be not only fair, but objective.
Perhaps the most absurd example of this ideology, for that is what it has become, came when Len Downie, then-editor of the Washington Post, copped to not voting, for fear of appearing biased, an example many journalists follow still.
Continue reading here at The Philadelphia Citizen, courtesy of Larry Platt.