Truth & Objectivity

Journalists are human beings. They do have biases and different personal values that may bring into their professions unconsciously. Hence, after all the vigorous debates and callings on journalists should be objective when reporting news, maybe it is time to change this traditional journalism mindset to something more achievable? I would like to point out that being objective is still a goal; however, we can use other pillars of good journalism as replacement. They are accuracy, fairness, thoroughness and transparency. I feel that these four pillars are too, useful in the approaches to quality journalism, easier to achieve when writing news reports, and definitely bring journalists to a better platform in their professions in a long run.

Accuracy is definitely the easiest to achieve among the four, whereby journalists should get their facts straight and report information that is beyond their current knowledge. Next is fairness, which means listening to different viewpoints, and incorporating them into journalism. Fairness is also about allowing publics to feedback and willing to listen to those who disagree. However, I feel that this may be easier to follow for online than in a print publication, much less a broadcast. Further on, is thoroughness that means to gather readers for their inputs on a news story. The last pillar is transparency, whereby it means the ways journalists present a news story. They should link their stories with supportive sources and materials in the most possible ways, and inform publics with close-to-the-ground facts and data.

In my opinion, transparency can be the new face of objectivity and is now fulfilling some of objectivity’s old role in the ecology of journalism knowledge. The reason is transparency provides publics with information by which they can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases that they had read before from other sources. Moreover, transparency also means to back a specific assertion (objectivity) up by letting publics and readers to look at different sources, disagreements, and the feedbacks that are initially bracketed out of the report. On the other hand, the problem with objectivity is that we could not really define ‘objectivity’ after all! It only tries to show the publics/readers what the incident of stories look like from no particular point of view, just like looking something in the dark! Another way to convey my point on this is even a journalist reports on a news story with his defined ‘objectivity’ without imparting transparency, is just an exaggerated self-opinioned work piece! Why should we trust what one person — even if is with good intentions — accept is true when there are many other alternatives of evidence, ideas, and arguments provided by other people?

Hence, transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to. Nevertheless, objectivity is still considered as an unattainable goal — but yet, had served as an important role in the past on how we came to trust information, and in the current economics of newspapers in the modern world.