"I asked Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Mears whom he was supporting for president. He replied (paraphrasing!), 'If I tell you, how can you trust what I write?,' to which I replied that if he doesn’t tell us, how can we trust what he blogs?"
David Weinberger wrote this in a piece about objectivity in journalism on his blog, which details the shift from objectivity to transparency that was caused by the advent of blogging. Is it because people have just stopped trying to be objective? Not necessarily.
When independent journalists started gaining a wider audience through the medium of the Internet, and more unorthodox and non-professionally trained writers set up their virtual soap boxes, the face of journalism started changing. We still have our regular mainstream writers and reporters but bloggers have added a new twist on an old tradition. New journalists are just wearing their hearts on their sleeves.
As David Carr wrote for the New York Times, these new journalists are looking a lot more like activists than the old media would prefer them to. The old media want people to think they are perfectly objective and take no sides, but in reality there is no such thing as objectivity. Just because a writer doesn't tell you exactly what to think and how to act, they push you in that direction through subjective coverage.
What a writer chooses to cover is the act of putting that topic on a higher echelon than other issues. We see it all the time — a topic gets little-to-no coverage on mainstream news even though many could see it as very important. In this day and age, it's easier to trust publications when they tell us exactly what their views are.
The idea of transparency over objectivity has gained a lot of ground because bloggers really brought it to light, and through the freedom of the Internet it has spread far and wide. Everyone has opinions, so just tell us what they are instead of hiding them and trying to seem like you're someone you're not. It's unethical.
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