David Edwards and David Cromwell, editors of Media Lens, an online UK-based media watch project set up in 2001, providing detailed and documented criticism of bias and omissions in the British media, wrote in their book Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media:
“News organisations would have us believe that they transmit information in a similarly neutral, natural way. They represent themselves as self-evidently dispassionate windows on the world. Thus, while there is plenty of discussion about what appears in these windows, there is next to no discussion about who built them, about what their goals and values might be. … And yet consider two salient facts: 1) much of the contemporary world is dominated by giant, multinational corporations; 2) the media system reporting on that world is itself made up of giant corporations. Indeed, media entities are often owned by the same giant corporations they are tasked with covering.” (Edwards & Cromwell, 2006: 1)
Annotations : The authors dream of a compassionate mass media, saying: “In considering the development of honest media, we begin from the premise that truth telling should be motivated by compassion for suffering rather than greed for wealth, status and privilege.” Mass media, Morales & Gilner, (2009) define, encompass communication by means of technology that reaches large numbers of people. Communication is through information.
In the Reporters Without Borders 2003 Report, Vinton Cerf (2003) writes:
“The antidote for bad information is not censorship but more and better information. Of course, this places a burden on the consumer of information to pay attention and to think critically about what is seen and heard. Surely this is what a responsible citizen should be doing. And surely this is what we should be teaching our children at home and at school.” [Emphasis added.]
Annotations : Nobody in his right mind should accept another man’s opinion—hook, line and sinker. Everyone of us possess the right to question whatever information we receive, not just on the Internet, but also every other form of information channel. Asking for a second opinion does not only apply to people with terminal diseases, to say the least, but if we truly are thinking human beings, we should be asking whether is the offered information is based on facts, biased or some form of misinformation.
“[W]here disinformation or misinformation exists, thoughtful citizens have a responsibility to draw attention to the problem, possibly even to provide information to counteract the bad data. Furthermore, citizens must bear in mind that not all relevant information is online and that thoroughness dictates examination of material from other sources than the Internet before concluding that due diligence has been taken.” (Cerf, 2003: 9)
Annotations : Aside from questioning the veracity of the information, all of us have the responsibility to react to perceived misinformation. In a previous post, Neil Postman cautions that “authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, become confused, they overgeneralize, they abuse logic and sometimes, common sense.” Even though great care might have been taken by some authors, they are still human beings vulnerable to their own subjectivity. Not everything we read online is based on facts. Some are based on opinions of those facts.
Interestingly, Richard Keeble’s Ethics for Journalists (2001: 134) states:
“Opinion and fact are so closely interlinked, you may consider it is impossible to separate them. Notions of objectivity and balance, moreover, become highly problematised when it is seen that a subjective process of selectivity governs the reporting of ‘facts’.”
Annotations : Even corporate journalism is criticized for their lapses in objectivity. Thus, with the advent of new Internet technologies, such as blogging, ‘amateur journalists’, as Lessig (2006: 242) defines in a previous post, has become sort of an alternative to mainstream media.
“Digital and internet-based technologies mean that participants in any event are now potentially irrefutable witnesses to what really happened. Backed up by a multitude of websites and bloggers around the world, these ‘citizen reporters’ represent a very real challenge to the compromised intermediaries of corporate journalism.” (Edwards & Cromwell, 2006: 195)
Annotations : Bloggers—citizen reporters or ‘amateur journalists’—are just like everyone else. Maybe the only difference is that they take their craft to a higher level in a sense that they do it for the love of writing, rather than for some economic gain. Their subjectivity might be questioned, but doing so they put some human interest to their stories, narratives might be the correct term, or at least attempt to understand something true about their world. Can bloggers disassociate their subjectivity and objectivity from what they are blogging about?
“[K]nowledge [is] organized information—information that is embedded in some context; information that has a purpose, that leads one to seek further information to understand something about the world. Without organized information, we may know something of the world, but very little about it. When one has knowledge, one knows how to make sense of information, knows how to relate information to one’s life, and, especially, knows when information is irrelevant.” (Postman, 2000: 93)
Most probably, objectivity is of less importance than the truth. Or are we missing something?
Notes:
Cerf, Vinton G. (2003). The Free Flow of Informations is not Free, The Internet Under Surveillance 2003 Report. Paris: Reporters Without Borders, 2003. p. 8. back to text.
Edwards, David & Cromwell, David (2006). Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media. London: Pluto Press, 2006. pp. 1, 195. back to text.
Keeble, Richard (2001). Ethics for Journalists. London & New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2001 p. 134. back to text.
Lessig, Lawrence (2006). Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books, Perseus, 2006. pp. 236—244. back to text.
Morales, Franc and Leah Gilner (2001-2009). TheSage’s English Dictionary and Thesaurus. Princeton University. back to text
Postman, Neil (2000). Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 2000. p. 93. back to text.
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The Grey Chronicles 