It is comical the degree to which journalists treat everything as a both-sides debate until something happens to *them* at which point it's an unambiguous moral problem.
@seldo As a former journo who took pride in being 100% committed to BBC's "impartiality" practice, I came to realise that the "both-side debate" argument is completely fallible.
The Politzer-winning Carl Bernstein says it best: "The truth is not neutral!"
@babak @seldo And this is exactly the sort of attitude that has the public losing so much faith in #journalism.
I personally know a few people in the journalism world, and it's amazing how confused they are about why people don't trust them as they put their fingers on the scales. As they _can't help_ but put their fingers on the scales.
Fallacious appeals to authority don't somehow justify biased reporting. It only embraces it, and turns reasonable readers off.
@jakobdorof @babak @volkris Babak is entirely correct, and got my point exactly.
@jakobdorof @volkris @babak journalists should take a moral position from the start, because impartiality is impossible, so they should stop pretending it is.
@seldo @jakobdorof @babak Think about how that sounds to potential consumers of news.
If I want to know what actually happened in the world yesterday, and someone is offering to actively push their personal moral ideas on me, well I'm going to pass.
If I want that I'll go to a church.
I think it's fair to say most of us want something different from #journalism.
It's one thing to recognize and work to mitigate the impact of personal biases, but it's something entirely different to embrace and impose them on the task.
Either way, again, I mean this practically and pragmatically, that sort of attitude has really harmed confidence in journalistic institutions today.
@volkris @babak @jakobdorof journalistic impartiality does not and has never existed. You are imagining a mythical time.
You misunderstand. I'm not talking about some ideal of journalism without bias.
But there's an enormous difference between recognizing natural human bias vs embracing intentional moralizing from those purporting to provide objective reporting.
Newsrooms lost audiences and relevance as they seemed to charge ahead into that second, into preaching.
@jakobdorof @volkris @babak and I'm telling you they never "lost" that. There has never been a time when newspapers did not have a strong point of view.
@volkris just take the L
@volkris you claim newsrooms started "preaching" and I'm telling you there was never a time they did not do that.