This isn’t how I’d have framed it, but I think it’s right we’re in danger of overcorrecting away from lazy both-sides neutrality in a way that would accelerate epistemic fragmentation & make journalism worse.
https://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1400098920026542087
Human beings all have biases & opinions & blind spots. The inference from this used to be “so we need strong professional norms to compensate.” My sense is there’s a growing camp for whom the inference is “so objectivity is a fraud & we should stop pretending.”
I think it needs to be stressed that this is as much about the economics of journalism as about norms. Both-sidesing is easy. Objectivity is hard. It requires time, work, subject matter expertise, and hard judgment calls about when reporter umpiring serves the reader.
https://twitter.com/HalfAgain/status/1400155621412982785
If economic constraints mean your staff is cut in half and you’ve got a bunch of 20-somethings all working 3 different beats & churning out a couple articles every day, you don’t have the resources to do objectivity. You can do neutrality or opinion writing.
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