Objectively speaking, people are stupid

No doubt you’re aware of the media bias ruining our democracy. Likely you’ve heard about it from media reports on the politicians, those who benefit the most from news outlets’ loss of the public trust. I think it was Reagan’s idea, God Bless Him.

Of course it’s not true; not completely true anyway. In fact, the constant striving for objectivity is the real problem with most news. If you want to hear the current president’s linguistic foibles, you’ll need to check in with Jon Stewart. Reporters learn early that it is bad form to let someone sound like a total idiot.

In the mainstream news, the now famous “Bushisms” are reproduced textually, not quoted. This gives the president the luxury of having professional writers get what he meant across, rather than what he said.

Since the advent of personal blogs, reporters have used the medium to get across what really happened rather than what they reported. Editorial space is is high demand and even those have to attempt balance; that’s the way things work.

Newsblogs now tend toward the utterly lame because the people most qualified to give real analysis are still so tied to objectivity that they cannot. If there’s any conspiracy it’s to protect objectivity at the cost of the truth.

We are in Iraq, and will likely soon be in Iran, not merely because reporters lacked the courage to ask difficult questions, but because they reported shoddy answers and obvious lies in the name of objectivity.

You can’t, in the news, say that a person is obviously lying, you can only quote someone with a contradictory point of view. This is where news has succeeded in being objective at the cost of the truth. Again, the reason you believe the media has a bias is because they reported it.

Americans want our news to be right, not accurate. We want facts supporting our worldview so we can hurl them at our opponents.

It’s interesting that the most successful news outlet -- Fox -- is successful because it has completely given up the pretense of objectivity. They realize that most people don’t want to have to make complex decisions; they want to have good reasons to continue thinking what they already think.

The only upside that I can see is that the pendulum continues to swing, or ,rather, allegedly there is a pendulum that allegedly moves at a uniform rate.