Anne Truitt Zelenka

One of my favorite journalists and thinkers, Virginia Postrel, muses on objectivity and journalism after reading Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston’s Objectivity:

Reading the book, I began to understand why I’ve never embraced my own profession’s celebration of objectivity. Real objectivity would turn the journalist into a C-Span camera, simply recording data without any sort of selection or pattern-making. With all due respect to C-Span, good journalism in fact requires trained judgment: about what’s important, what’s interesting, what’s worth telling. Good journalism includes story telling and analysis, even in straight news stories and all the more in features or analytical pieces. Mistaking fairness or accuracy for “objectivity” only confuses journalists, their audiences, and their critics.

This is exactly what I’ve been struggling with in trying to figure out my own approach to blogging and to journalism. I addressed it in Tell Me a Story, but Tell Me the Truth. I wondered about it in On Covering Web 2.0 for GigaOM.

Postrel quotes from the book:

Subjectivity is the precondition for knowledge, the self who knows….

Objectivity is to epistemology what extreme asceticism is to morality. Other epistemological therapies were rigorous: Plato’s rejection of the senses, for example, or Descartes’s radical doubt. But objectivity goes beyond rigor. The demands it makes on the knower outstrip even the most strenuous forms of self-cultivation, to the brink of self-destruction.

There’s no knowing without the self yet objectivity seeks to extinguish the self.

Web 2.0 starts from the self, requires real people. Maybe blogging, in that it represents itself as coming from a real person, is actually a good model for reporting. But you have to have the fairness and accuracy too.