Journalism Ethics: Objectivity In the chapter for last week, Merrill discussed all the ways that journalists can, inadvertently or deliberately, become propagandists -- the opposite of objective observers and reporters. In this week's chapter on general semantics, he says that close attention to the use of language is one way journalists (and everyone else, too) can come as close as humanly possible to truthful communication. General semantics is a way of looking at how people use language and how the words they choose affect human behavior. Probably its best-known idea is that "the map is not the territory." That is, the word we use to define or describe something is just that -- a word. It is not the thing itself. From that idea, we get a variety of other useful things to remember about words and how we can use them to convey meaning that corresponds as well as possible to reality. What does all this have to do with objectivity?
Can Reporters Handle the Truth? | The New Individualist April 2007 -- On August 5, 2006, Reuters published a photograph of smoke rising over Beirut from buildings hit by Israeli bombs. It was one of many pictures the news service circulated in covering the month-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Within hours, bloggers noticed that the two plumes of smoke looked suspiciously alike: a single plume had apparently been duplicated by photo-editing software, making the bomb damage seem worse than it was. Within another few hours, Reuters had acknowledged the error and fired the photographer, a Lebanese free-lancer named Adnan Hajj. An innocent error? The Hajj affair was one small skirmish in another war: the perennial—and, mercifully, less violent—war about media bias. Meanwhile, a small industry of media watchdogs and activists track the major media for signs of false or slanted content. My intent here is not to join the media bias war as a combatant. Examples like this show only that a point of view can lead to nonobjective coverage.
A Comparative Analysis: Objective & Public Journalism Techniques Labels of elitism and egalitarianism are useless because there are elements of each in both objective and public journalism. Each advocates a different level of constraint on the press. The past 50 years have witnessed much scholarship and debate regarding the practice of objective journalism.(1) This discussion has been intensified with the advent of public journalism, whose advocates boldly assert that objective journalism is fundamentally flawed.(2) Not surprisingly, much heated debate has emerged in which proponents of either journalistic practice accuse the other of being negligent, misleading or culpable in the erosion of democracy. Of key concern to this paper is the propensity for participants in this debate to talk past one another - to be too quick to judge and dismiss the other practice as intrinsically broken, and thus, something to be immediately recanted and forsaken. Focus on process Achievement Study of technique The study of technique is the study of process. Focus on means
Luna: Opposition to for-profit education providers is like Occupy Wall Street (video) « IdahoReporter.com Note: This is part 1 of a five-installment series of interviews with Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna. The series runs Monday-Friday, Dec. 12-16. Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna believes that opponents of having for-profit companies deliver online school courses in Idaho have a mentality not unlike protestors in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Luna also said that those worried about for-profit education companies providing online school courses might be anti-capitalist in nature. “This undertone that somehow because for-profit companies are going to want to compete for educations dollars is the end of public education as we know it, that is an Occupy Wall Street argument that we see going on all across the country,” Luna said, “where there’s this attack on capitalism and an attack on profits.” Luna has sometimes found himself a bit on the defensive since the Legislature approved his education reform plans in the 2011 legislative session.
Occupy Wall Street class comes too soon - The Daily Targum: Editorials: Students at New York University will have the opportunity to take classes next semester on Occupy Wall Street. Undergrads will have the option of enrolling in “Why Occupy Wall Street? The History and Politics of Debt and Finance.” A seminar at the graduate level will also be offered. There is no doubt that Occupy Wall Street is a legitimate movement at this point. It may be that the professors who proposed and created these classes are only using Occupy Wall Street as means through which to entice students into taking them.
Occupy Wall St. protesters march around Goldman Sachs downtown Jefferson Siegel for New York Da Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters assembe on Church St. in Manhattan to march to the Goldman Sachs headquarters on West St. Some dressed as squid in reference to a Rolling Stone article that the investment bank. "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Occupy Wall Street protesters donned squid costumes and marched to the Goldman Sachs headquarters downtown yesterday to call on the banking giant to pay more in taxes. “We’re standing in solidarity against an investment firm that was highly responsible for the economic crisis,” said demonstrator Rick McAllister, 22. Jackie Sheeler, 54, said she was marching to try to end money’s power in politics. “Goldman Sachs defrauds people ruthlessly,” said Sheeler, a teacher from West Harlem. No arrests were reported.
Removed: Occupy Wall street article | World news This article is the subject of a legal complaint from Peter Grossman. This past Sunday, a deputation from Occupy Wall Street crossed the bridge from Manhattan and brought its protest to the Brooklyn residence of one of New York's "vultures" This type of vulture doesn't roost in a tree, but in a swish brownstone. A "vulture" is a financial speculator who, as we recently reported, gets his hands on debts owed by desperately poor nations. Grossman, tipped off about the demonstration, was apparently absent from his brownstone. The OWS marchers had come at the call of Friends of the Congo. "We want to connect what Peter Grossman is doing to the Occupy Wall Street movement – that he's a part of the 1% that's trying to rip off a nation; that Occupy Wall Street is a domestic issue, but we're trying to connect it to the international struggle as well – whether it's the people in the Congo, or people in Egypt, or anywhere else." I don't think the 1% can be pleased. And it's spreading.
Social norms - Michael Hechter, Karl-Dieter Opp In Defence of a Supposedly Outdated Notion: The Range of Application of Journalistic Objectivity | Gauthier | Canadian Journal of Communication Gilles Gauthier (Université Laval) If thought is to go far enough, the imagination must go further. If the will is to accomplish enough, it must imagine more. Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l'esprit scientifique Among all the clichés that clutter up human minds, there is one which gives rise to a stir of approval in its audience each time it is sententiously pronounced: "Objectivity does not exist--in reporting." Few journalists or journalism scholars today would hazard calling upon the principle or ideal of objectivity. In the present paper, I confront the cliché that objectivity in journalism is useless, illusory, or artificial. In working towards this definition, my first step is to attempt to identify the aspects of journalism involving objectivity. My approach is essentially negative: first, in a series of propositions, I shall identify those aspects of journalism to which matters of objectivity cannot apply. 1. 2. This idea is not new in itself. 3. 4. 5. Note References