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Couple of easy straightforward questions for us to chew on: 1. What is ‘objectivity’ supposed to mean? And 2. does it exist? Lewis Raven Wallace, a journalist and audiomaker fired from his public radio job over his blog post entitled ‘Objectivity is dead and I'm okay with it’, considers the principals and practice of objectivity, and what might be fairer ones.
EXTRA MATERIALS:
Lewis’s book The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity is well worth your time. I learned an awful lot from it that I wish I had known way earlier.
"Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. It seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it."
“It’s probably good for democracy for this to be less personality based and more about the work.”
Seeing them cited in Lewis’s book, I’m now very interested to read Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News and the medieval text The Romance of Silence.
“You were supposed to have a point of view, which wasn’t allowed in the daily newspaper journalism with the sort of B.S. objectivity that they still try to pretend like they have. There was none of that with City Paper.”
The origins of ‘debate’ I covered briefly way back in Election Lexicon. Not covered: how the term seems to be used just to mean “allow diabolical nightmare speech to flow forth unchecked”.
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YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
nuncupative, adjective, law (of a will or testament): declared orally, especially by a mortally wounded soldier or sailer.
CREDITS:
Lewis Raven Wallace is a journalist and audiomaker. Find his work, including an audio series about objectivity, at lewispants.com.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The original Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick. Download his songs at palebirdmusic.com, listen to his podcasts Song By Song and Neutrino Watch, and hear more of his composition on the science podcast for kids Maddie’s Sound Explorers.
Find the show at twitter.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/helenzaltzman and instagram.com/allusionistshow.
