

Hunter S. Thompson and the Death of Objectivity - amouat
http://www.adrianmouat.com/bit-bucket/2009/07/hunter-s-thompson-and-the-death-of-objectivity/
About transparency vs objectivity in newspapers and blogs, and how it all harks bark to Gonzo.
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catone
Except that Michelle Malkin and LiberalOasis aren't sources of news -- they're
commentary. And the editorial pages of traditional papers are very clearly
biased in one direction or another, and that bias is obvious to anyone who
reads them.

Where there exists a problem is when blogs with a clear bias try to report
news, and pollute that reportage with their opinions while claiming to their
readers to be covering things objectively.

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amouat
Yes, good point. Blogs are more analogous to editorials than news stories, and
editorials are usually clear in political bias.

To be honest, I wish I'd spent a little longer on the post; I think I lost the
thread slightly.

I certainly think any problem with blogs pretending to be objective (which I
would argue is the exception rather than the rule) is nowhere near as big a
problem as papers claiming to be objective but in reality having an agenda. As
papers are usually much more subtle in the ways they bend the truth and less
transparent than blogs, they often get away with appearing objective. And of
course, people can normally comment on a blog to correct things.

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balding_n_tired
F&L on the Campaign Trail delivered authoritativeness? Now there's news. _The
Boys on the Bus_, written during the same campaign period, had something to
say.

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amouat
Which is referenced in the F&L; they were both writers for Rolling Stone. F&L
is certainly considered a reference, at least by Wikipedia:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1972)

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ivankirigin
Objectivity doesn't exist

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zimbabwe
Of course it does. Physics and math are objective, for instance.

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ivankirigin
Our theories about physics and math at not objective. See string theory or
recent story about 1969 nytimes retraction of "spaceflight impossible". I'd
also argue that objectivity in quantum mechanics doesn't exist.

of course, I was talking about people and journalism, not some vague idea of
objectivity

