Media Neutrality: That Dangerous Lie Refuted

            American attitudes are more partisan than ever before (at least within recent memory), while those, who aren’t committed to a political party, suggest their fence riding is about finding a middle ground. Non-partisan groups and media are giving the public the false impression that there is such a thing as a necessarily correct and neutral middle ground. An informal fallacy, (dealing with a claim’s soundness, not its validity) known as the argument to moderation, addresses this misconception. Sometimes, one side is correct. Thinking people shouldn’t come to believe that partisan policy disputes have an alternative position in between them. Beyond the danger of this fallacy on political attitudes, mainstream media, that purports to be neutral and non-partisan, conceals a monopoly on the truth, determining who or what can and cannot be covered. The deceivingly classic journalistic boundary, between reporting just the facts and editorializing, is blurred, because it had always been so.

            Journalistic objectivity is a contradiction. Points of view from nowhere or everywhere are impossible and illogical. Alleged objective questions such as who, what, when, where, and why are specious. Concentrating on that set of questions obscures the questions behind those questions. Decisions concerning what stories to cover and how to cover them, made prior to reporting, are informed by the partisan ideology of the journalists. To illustrate, decisions about which facts, out of the indefinite array encompassing the given situation, should be included in a report, are clandestinely made and never announced to the public. Moreover, once those facts are decided upon, one chooses how to approach them from a specific level of concern. After settling on an approach to view several curated facts, ordering and context are established, further clandestinely influencing the final presentation. Although the degree of freedom for curating and evaluating situational facts varies across circumstances, the public ignorance of this process undermines the alleged concept of nonpartisan or neutral journalism.

            Denying journalistic objectivity does not imply an absence of commonalities to everyone’s experience of a situation. Multiple points of view, despite being distinct from one another, can overlap and share content. However, the degree of shared content between points of view does not remove contextual influences that are unique to each view (its historicity). The historicity of each viewpoint adds layers of meaning over and above the common or shared content between them. That is, a view’s historicity augments a given situation with a layer of gloss across its shared factual content. Disregarding these layers would render reports about events as irrelevant or incomplete to the audience. Absent this gloss, any report’s semantic gaps are filled in by the prehension of the given viewer, thereby allowing the gloss to color the facts before one can consciously recognize them. Historicity informs the perception of all facts, prior to their comprehension.

            Acknowledging the futility of a belief in objective journalism, does not entail the same about journalism as a method. Media agents’ historicity is only a problem, when one believes it’s absent in news reports. However, if one can approach media by accurately and reliably identifying the degree of the journalists’ partisanship, then citizens won’t be implicitly encouraged to suspend their critical faculties, merely from their belief that a news source is neutral or nonpartisan. As a result of transparency for partisan media, a sense of individual responsibility is elicited among the citizenry. That is, the absence of an apparently neutral source of news, hastens one’s sense of discernment between truth and falsehood. In that way, one can rightly exercise their duty to be a well-informed voter and citizen.

Like training a muscle, learning to improve one’s sensitivity of truth and falsehood requires an ongoing process of evaluation. Moreover, increasing one’s aptitude for discernment is directly proportional to someone’s familiarity with the practice itself. Embedded habits require significantly more mental effort, than less entrenched habits. Thereby, any initial complications with learning discernment will lessen with continued practice. In response to the individual’s attempt at media discernment, entrepreneurial interests will eventually offer services which make it easier for the average person to judiciously compare multiple sources of news, from diverging partisan perspectives and agendas. Despite any specious doubts (concerning this as a radical departure from journalism- as most currently know it), enhancing our ability to discern truth from falsehood, by evaluating an array of political, economic, and social perspectives, is our duty as voters and fellow citizens.   

            Disinforming the public is not the faux-neutral and pseudo-nonpartisan media’s worst or only threat to our republic’s values of self-governance and civic virtue. Partisan agendas are, at best, an apologetic to help inform a cause’s proponents on how to better defend it, and, at worst, an inept polemic to discredit some counter position. Yet, a person naïve to the deception of neutrality in journalism, lacks any recourse to identify the agenda behind the veil of objectivity. Regardless of a lack of awareness of the agenda, one unintentionally adopts the assumptions behind the reporting, thereby coloring their interpretations of phenomenon without any appreciation of its influence on their behavior. As a result, overlooked assumptions are taken to be self-evident truths not requiring any explanation (accusing anyone requesting a justification of doing so in bad faith). For that reason, a sense of resentment is fomented toward others who disagree with their pseudo-neutral view. The naive cannot imagine why anyone would reasonably disagree with the ostensible facts. Subsequently, they conclude any disagreements merely stem from one’s reactionary predisposition (done in bad faith). Indeed, the deception of journalistic objectivity can incite people to hate others, for not reflecting an affiliation with the tacit implications of an outlet’s agenda-encouraging suppositions.

            Facts alone don’t tell a story. Historicity arranges and curates the known facts into meaningful narratives, weighing them by importance and relevance to us personally. For example, physics and chemistry can describe the material and process of an event, but their explanatory power is limited. Nothing about a flame heating metal and water molecules informs one of any goal to make tea. Likewise, our historicity must be acknowledged straightforwardly, by becoming aware of the partisan landscape of media. Prior to the concern with objectivism in journalism schools, media outlets were usually comprised of one writer with an unmistakable political orientation. Each writer would wear their partisan affiliations on their sleeve. This was later referred to as the political model (contrasted with the objective model). Today, journalism ought to revive the political model, while incorporating an objective methodology (not ideology) into their reporting. Therefore, journalistic objectivity isn’t confused for an explanation of an objectively described reality. Instead, objective methods would be applied in different circumstances, but with transparent concerns and points of view (the questions behind the questions).

            Ultimately, the political model of journalism, wedded with an applied set of objective methods, lends itself to be harnessed across situations. Accordingly, a sagacity is cultivated in each citizen, reminding them to always take each perspective critically, by considering its historicity. Alternatively, a landscape model is a more desirable paradigm; it implies a multiplicity of perspectives, both nested within (vertical alignment of a topic- its gradation) and as a spectrum between one another (horizontal association of a topic- its interfaces). This landscape, despite the multiple perspectives, has a common ground of methodology. Correspondingly, this model obliges the citizen to become acclimated to the coursing political terrain, ultimately developing a personal cartography, comprehended as an ecology of political viewpoints. Partisanship would be determined by the degree of overlap between each citizen’s perspective of the landscape. Thus, by considering historicity and personally weighing political perspectives (creating paths through a terrain that’s shaped by situational pressures), an individual’s cartography results in a true golden mean, not of the media’s pseudo-neutral perspective or the fence-sitter’s supposed perfect middle, but, instead, of the citizen’s own enriched political perspective.