_

… But you certainly indicated that ‘invisible framing’ is a bad thing.

So ‘Framing’ that’s non-obvious to the reader is indeed — bad.

And most all framing in American journalism is not obvious to typical readers.

Worse IMO, most professional journalists/editors are not even aware of their own framing and bias. It’s basic human nature to automatically blend one’s world-view into all one’s thinking.

How do you fix that in journalism ?

One could suggest that the difficulties for utilities companies would disappear if they were to become public utilities, whose primary goal was responding to societal needs, not to maximize profit. This is, in fact, a centrist position in much of the developed world.

But would you ever see it mentioned in a mainstream American newspaper? A large part of the problem with “journalistic objectivity,” it seems to me, is that it is reactive and parochial rather than analytic. It is captured by its desire to represent the opinions of the politically powerful, and thus cannot be truly objective, since it can’t see outside of the box that it has framed itself into.

That’s why calling itself “objective” is a façade. And, you know, people tend to know a façade when they see one. There’s a good reason why educated people tend to value newspapers but have a low opinion of journalists: the experience of reading newspapers is generally disappointing.

The Australian Electoral Commission won’t employ anyone who is a member of a political party. A newspaper requiring its journalists to remain *formally* unaffiliated from political regardless of personal views seems similarly reasonable.

This is partly because of the reason you note – that the act of joining a party or contributing will increase your mental commitment to a particular point of view. It’s well known that bias can become internalised or unconscious and difficult to spot.

What I remember about that era is various gay activists shrieking that Reagan gave them AIDs. While normally sympathetic to suffering, this wackdom turned me off to their agenda.

Yet the press thought it important to promote this bit of unhinged wacko hysteria.

See current media movement on gun control—it ain’t about facts or reason,it’s all about emotion, hysteria and hating The Other.

Sad. Pathetic. Yet totally predictable.

Christ in a sidecar, we’ve got legislators telling our state’s scientists they can’t use scientifically accepted statistics and modeling to forecast the likely rise in sea level. In a state with a lot of fishing and tourist spots on land barely four feet above mean high tide, I’m supposed to insist we get “both sides of the story”? No, thank you, because sometimes one side isn’t just wrong, it’s insane.

Moreover, the fact that the leadership of one of America’s two major parties has largely gone insane over the past 30 years is the biggest unreported political story in the history of U.S. mainstream media. And it just goes on: Every single Sunday, you can watch George Stephanopoulos, David Gregory et al., in the words of songwriter Warren Zevon, sit on their asses and nod at stupid things. That’s not helping the media and it’s certainly not helping the country.

Because his blog doesn’t take comments, I wrote to him and pointed out that endings A and D, whether you liked them or not, at least constituted assertions of fact that could be objectively proved or disproved, whereas endings B and C were speculations on what MIGHT happen based on the information in the beginning of the sentence.

I said I would have preferred EITHER A or D to B or C, for that reason. However, I conceded that, with an appropriate factual basis, including those speculations, and labeling them as such (“One possible result could be …”) might provide valuable context for readers: Here are the facts; here are several possible reasons why they MIGHT be important or several possible consequences of those facts.

Fallows wrote back indicating he might explore that point further. I’m back from vacation, in work and at school, so I don’t know if he has.

Real news is about context. AIDS is bad because it drains on people, families, workplaces and society as a health problem. Still, those who think someone got what he or she deserved were important for a discussion about public policy.

So, yes, the judgment of a journalist was used in determining what is news. Hopefully, those applying the principles still remember that context gives news meaning.

I hear this kind of thing frequently and it makes no sense to me. I’m the same person regardless of whether I contributed to a campaign or, alternatively, wished to do so but was prevented by one of my employer’s rules. Making the contribution doesn’t change my biases.(*) Sullivan thinks those biases should be hidden, because readers can’t deal with them.

I resent that. Also, I think it makes the problem worse. The rules prevent me as a reader from distinguishing between reporters who contribute to a cause and those who don’t. It drives bias underground where I can’t see it. And if the reporter can’t contribute like an ordinary citizen, how else can she support her candidate other than by the way she writes her articles?

But most of all, I’m tired of depending on journalists and their editors to purportedly correct their own biases before taking up the mantle of neutrality. Very few people have the presence of mind to correct their own biases — more people are able to fool themselves into thinking they have corrected their biases. The mantle of neutrality is too rhetorically powerful to be misused that way.

(*) Actually I can imagine that making a contribution might change my biases. It might increase my commitment to the cause. It might make it harder for me to take a broader perspective. But Sullivan and others in her position don’t make that argument; instead they talk down to their readers like this.