The Mirage of Media Objectivity

“Writing becomes a contest between mutually incompatible conceptions of public life. We do not simply have varying prescriptions for social ills; the afflictions we observe are fundamentally different.”

An unforgettable scene in the 1979 satire Life of Brian has the protagonist trying to disabuse a flock of Judean peasants of the conviction that he is the savior of their immortal souls. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he pleads from a window under which the colorless mass has gathered. “You don’t need to follow me; you don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You are all individuals!” The mob assents in unison, “Yes—we are all individuals.” A series of such atoms affirming their autonomy, in a new promotional video for Euronews, is identical save for a complete unawareness of irony: “Nobody twists my truths,” it drools, “Nobody moulds my views,” “I make up my own mind.” It ends with the broadcaster’s logo floating above the depressing factoid that it has 145 million monthly viewers. If all of them are as self-assured as that, what do they need Euronews for?

There is an undying misbelief that thinking for oneself involves collecting as many independently existing things called “facts” as one can and gluing them into an unshakeable mosaic of reality. Once-seaworthy papers and news networks have assumed the role of supplier: sage merchants of the raw materials required for the business of thinking. No one capable of the act should buy such rubbish or allow the illusion to persist: The political media is a market of variously informed opinions, not of neutral and unprocessed data. It is time all publishers wiped the glaze of objectivity off their brightly painted merchandise.

Yaron Steinbuch of the New York Post might not realize that his July headline “Danish Cartoonist Whose Drawing Sparked Charlie Hebdo Massacre Dead at 86” is not clinical reportage. It is true that the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard expired this summer (in his sleep—contrary to the wishes of Muslim thugs to have it be elsewhere). And set aside that his satire in the Danish Jyllands-Posten, reprinted in Charlie Hebdo in 2006, is unrelated to the barbarism against the French magazine’s staff in 2011 and 2015 (earned proudly by the French for different cartoons and in their own right). With the verb sparked, the headline implies that Westergaard is at least somewhat culpable for sectarian murder. Whether this is accurate reporting does not much matter; it is a bad opinion on causation and moral responsibility.