On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 4:19 PM, Divya Manian <divya.man...@gmail.com> wrote: [...] > *Almost* all journalism is of this kind, the rarer form that is actually > objective is almost never found,
Huh? Your average beat reporter (whose ilk forms the overwhelming majority of the hack brigade) reporting on the missing cats, and stolen wallets and malfunctioning public works does exactly that - he objectively reports facts without using his interpretive skills very much. You cannot interpret facts without adopting a subjective opinion - however slight. > a few of that kind wins Pulitzer Prizes, Palagummi Sainath - 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism Tomas Friedman - Order of the British Empire Arundhati Roy - Booker Prize, 1997 Please give me some examples of "objective" journalism that you'd like to see more of, and who in your opinion is a model journalist? > but almost all of them have an axe to grind and write eloquently about their > pet theory. Interpretive journalists are like sunglasses - you choose to see through them because it makes it possible to stare at the facts, or sometimes because you look good in them. It is your responsibility to choose how you interpret facts - the authors and journalists are just interpretive aids. > I especially hate photo journalists who show pictures of torture, babies > dying of hunger while vulture waits nearby, etc. They are meant to titillate > and blind us with excess anger and fury. After seeing those pictures, we can > never have an objective opinion about the "evil men" who are the cause for > such atrocities. I don't understand the search for objectivity in individuals - I don't believe it's possible. Emotive events like looking at a picture of a child dying of hunger invoke ideas that are already in our heads. It could be anger and rage, but it could very well be one of these: - to a believer in Karma it is the cycle of life moving on - to a first world supremacist it is reason to rejoice in his first world competence - to a person who's very near that fate himself, he's just glad it's not him - to a bleeding heart yuppie it's a sign to open up his purse strings, or volunteer in Africa > What I have realised is that every human being is as capable of those exact > atrocities. It does not take an "evil person" to do it, just you and me with > an extra push (or for some none at all). For all you care, these titillating > pictures might be sufficient to turn us into violent zombies with intention > to crush/kill the perpetrators. Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command by S.L.A. Marshall http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0806132809/ -- Path breaking book written in the afterglow of WWII and adopted by US and other Military policy makers as an important training guide "[In World War II] the best showing that could be made...was that one man in four had made at least some use of his firepower." — S.L.A. Marshall, 1947 On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0316040932 "The good news is that the vast majority of soldiers are loath to kill in battle. Unfortunately, modern armies, using Pavlovian and operant conditioning have developed sophisticated ways of overcoming this instinctive aversion. The psychological cost for soldiers, as witnessed by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. The psychological cost for the rest of us is even more so: contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army's conditioning techniques and, according to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's thesis, is responsible for our rising rate of murder among the young. " Cheeni
