Valuing context. We recognize that our job is not simply to accurately record a series of facts, but to provide those facts in a form that is coherent and meaningful, empowering our reader to place a given event or development in concert with other current events and with history.

As the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar observed: truth is symphonic—the only way to hear its totality is if each instrument contributes its distinct part.

Speed, he argued, is the enemy of rigor. “Complex and slippery,” news takes time to understand. “The true patterns of the journalistic apprentice are not the slick persons who scoop the news, but the patient and fearless men of science who have labored to see what the world really is.”

It is, in fact, objectivity’s self-appointed defenders themselves who have led its erosion. Rather than emphasize a fair reporting process , they focused obsessively on the appearanceand performanceof supposed personal objectivity, wielding the term to police personal expression—not journalistic work—in both public and private contexts. Their north... See more