| i may be being to literal with the definition of “objective” that i’m using and if i am, apologies up front. i’m not sure there will ever be such a thing as an “objective” based news source. so often there is incredibly important information that needs to be part of the public knowledge base yet that piece of news is quite literally impossible to report on and be entirely “objective.” i think a better standard would be for these organizations to actually follow already well established journalistic codes of ethics. so many of our organizations intentionally muddy the waters between opinion pieces and journalist pieces and frankly it’s gross. particularly because our schools put almost no emphasis on media literacy. this leaves most people vulnerable to crazy amounts of manipulation. another piece of this which has bothered me lately is when folks use “objective” to imply that emotions aren’t an incredibly important piece of our decision making. when we’re discussing wider society, EQ is absolutely just as important as IQ and this trend where certain people are trying to delude themselves and others into thinking they can somehow magically escape this basic fact is just wild to see. i can’t help but question what i think is a naive obsession with “objective” and how much of a fools errand it is ultimately. the final thing i’ll comment on is this idea that we seem to be stuck on, this idea of one or two major information sources. we do this with everything from social media sites to news sites. when i go to parties at friends houses, or out to bars with my friends, we don’t go to places where we won’t like the people. and that’s absolutely the norm throughout society in the real world. but for some reason We, the larger tech community delude ourselves into thinking it would be any different online. from what i’ve read of the recent past, there used to be tens of thousands of places people got their news from. every town had multiple news papers. there were countless magazines. countless journals. etc… yet hilariously We, the tech community, keep convincing ourselves that shoving everyone into the same domain name is a good idea. and then we act so shocked when the obvious inevitable happens. this kind of thinking causes problems in so many directions. if i’m in a group of classic Corvette fans, and i’m constantly over and over and over confronted by Camaro fans. “Explain yourself to me. if you don’t explain yourself to me, obviously that means camaro is objectively better than corvette!” this would be obnoxious and the organizers would ban the person for being toxic. we need to allow ourselves space to enjoy ourselves or discuss our passions without random dipshits constantly demanding we explain ourselves. and ironically, if there is one place where we should be able to spread out into countless directions, it’s the internet. and news should be no exception to this. we need to uphold news orgs to already well established journalistic ethics codes and from there quit with this absurd idea that there should be only one. |