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

The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This... See more

The psychologist Philip Fernbach said one of the most pressing problems facing public discourse, one only exacerbated by the information age, is the growing gap between what people think they know and what they actually know. (In fact, people have been shown to mistake what they can Google for their own knowledge.) In the next stage of its... See more