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Why Doesn’t Obama Ban Iranian Press TV? by Kenneth R. Timmerman
The Case of CH2M HILL: $2 Billion in Crony Stimulation by Rusty Weiss
The Truth about George Soros by AIM Staff
Lifting the Veil on WikiLeaks by AIM Staff
The Truth about Al-Jazeera English by Cliff Kincaid
Reaganomics and Obamanomics in the Media and in Reality by Malcolm A. Kline, Don Irvine and Spencer Irvine
How State Budget Battles Could Mean More Criminals Back on the Streets by Michael Tremoglie
Radical Muslims, Environmentalists and the Green Jihad by Mark Musser
Russian-Backed Propaganda Networks Claim Obama is a CIA Agent by Cliff Kincaid
Media Conceal True Nature of Flash Mob Racial Violence by John T. Bennett
NBC’s Mitchell Should Resign Over Telling Gaddafi’s Lies (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) by Cliff Kincaid
CASA de Maryland: The Illegals’ ACORN by James Simpson
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That phrase “transparency is the new objectivity,” is interesting, if logically impossible. The notion that it’s a positive trend to know where reporters stand has some merit, but for that model to work we need to always know where every reporter stands, and we don’t, even with Twitter. Beyond that, it demands that the news consumer take over the duties previously shouldered by journalists, the attempt at fairness and objectivity. That means that for most stories absorbed, he or she must seek out the same story from different sources, compare slants and then process. This doubles the time required keep up with the news, but worse, it serves the psychological temptation to self-validate by staying in one’s ideological echo chamber, and that, I think, is largely responsible for the abandonment of the more pragmatic middle and the resulting rancorous intransigence in debate.
Another issue is that a big part of bias is not in the actual content created but in the decision whether to *run* the content at all, and if so, where and with what emphasis and visibility. A current example is the DOJ’s handling of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, recently explored in hearings by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. You would think *any* editor would consider it news if billy club wielding thugs at the polls were not prosecuted meaningfully for political reasons. It has implications for our most basic right, yet, the coverage is scant.
I think there’s a market again for objective journalism, as a convenience if for no other reason, but more importantly, for the health of the body politic. If a media outlet abandons objectivity, why should we believe they are being transparent? What we have now looks less and less like journalism and more and more like something else.