Arguing for Our Lives by Robert Jensen

Author:Robert Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

CHAPTER 6

Thinking Critically about News Media

Perhaps the one thing that unites most Americans is their disgust with, and distrust of, journalism: Everyone hates the media. Surveys show that less than one-third of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, and the level of trust is dropping.1 Much of this distrust is expressed as a belief that journalists are not objective and, therefore, have become a vehicle for propaganda.

As is often the case, these critiques typically are made with no clear definition of “objectivity” or “propaganda.” In this chapter I will offer some suggestions about definitions, not with the expectation that everyone will come to agreement about journalism but in the hope that such disagreements will be more productive.

Objectivity

Like most terms, “objective” and “objectivity” are used in different ways in different contexts. In everyday conversation, if someone is making an argument that seems to be unfairly skewed or unnecessarily argumentative, we often counsel that the person to “try to be objective.” What we typically mean is that the other person’s passion or prejudices might be impeding their ability to see things clearly. Being objective, in this case, means something like this: Try to understand your preconceived ideas about the subject and recognize how those preconceptions might skew your perspective, even to the point that you may be tempted to fudge the facts or make claims that aren’t true. When we ask each other to be objective, we are reminding ourselves to keep an open mind and not shade the truth or make things up just because they bolster our argument.

In that everyday sense of the term, objectivity is a good thing—for me, for you, for journalists, for everyone. Objectivity is just another way of reminding ourselves what good intellectual practice looks like. To be objective, we need not pretend we don’t have a point of view, that we aren’t passionate about our ideas and commitments. Rather, the reminder to be objective is a corrective if our passion leads to sloppiness in our critical thinking.

Objectivity also has a more specific meaning in the context of a scientific laboratory. Scientists don’t claim to have developed a method that brackets out all subjective decisions; science is an enterprise carried out by humans. But the scientific method offers a way to generate knowledge that can be rigorously tested and verified. Scientists develop protocols for measuring aspects of the world they wish to study and devising experiments to test hypotheses. These methods are not foolproof, but they have been extremely successful in expanding our understanding of the world.

This scientific sense of objectivity may guide our intellectual practices—we adapt ideas about measurement and experimentation in rough fashion to our everyday life. For example, if we want to know whether a dish we’ve cooked tasted better with or without hot peppers, we might conduct an ad hoc experiment by preparing the food both ways and asking our dinner guests which they prefer. Journalists also do this, but not with the kind of rigor that one sees in a laboratory.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.