Xark!

Transparency journalism: an FAQ

If the news industry is going to explore transparency as an alternative to the “journalistic objectivity” claim to credibility (and yes, as a matter of fact, we are), then this big idea is going to have to confront a series of small questions. Thank goodness we can begin answering them.

What's wrong with objectivity?

First, we all need to agree on something important. Scientific objectivity is an experimental condition that limits observation so that the collected data will be identical for all observers (and, if managed properly, repeatable in multiple trials). Journalistic objectivity is an assumed perspective that includes a set of variable practices, but is essentially a subjective claim to credibility.

The problem with that credibility claim is that Americans don't believe it. A Gallop poll in September found that 57 percent of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. That's a record low for this Gallop question, and it reflects a decades-long declining trend that others have noticed as well.

Reading William Irwin Thompson

Paradoxically, for my generation, one that came of age in the revolutionary spirit of the affluent 1960s, liberation from institutions and their systems of meanings was not a relationship with a specific oppressive condition but a general, eternal, and absolute value in and of itself. In challenging the rhetoric of Western Civilization, the generation that mocked the bourgeois liberal pieties of its fathers and mother rather smugly took for granted a niave and simpleminded faith in revolt against all forms of authority and enduring value. And, as always seems to be the case in the world of fashion, the French led the way. Roland Barthes announced "The Death of the Author" and tore down this idol of literate civilization; Michel Foucault exposed the "episteme" that bound institutions and forms of knowing into the "discourse" that was itself the system of domination; and Derrida made certain, with an ultimate Deconstruction, that no text would ever rise up again with a pretense to ultimate meaning, or high-minded and high-handed final authority. For an affluent and expanding bureaucracy of academic literary critics and behavioral scientists, this demolishing of the mystique of the solitary romantic artist who could pretend to cosmic knowledge without the necessary university credentials was indeed welcome news, and without much regret the culture of Author-hood and Authority was shouldered aside. "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile... We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."