I’ve only glanced over his blog, but I suspect this guy could be a potential recruit for the Unparty. What do y’all think?
I mean, aside from the nice allusion in the blog’s name to Michael Palin’s wonderful rant on the proper basis for wielding "supreme executive power (search at the link for ‘ponds’)," this guy’s way of expressing his philosophy is in places eerily similar to my own. I really started when I saw the phrase, "American journalism has been damaged by worshiping at
the altar of objectivity." Yeah, I know he’s paraphrasing someone else, but I’ve been talking about the fact that worship of the "false god Objectivity" is a barrier in the search for journalistic truth for years (oddly, though I’ve said it hundreds of times, I can’t find a single instance where I wrote it; I must be searching wrong). It’s the reason I made the leap from news to editorial — you don’t get to tell the truth in news.
What do I mean by that? Probably not what you think I mean. What I do mean is that news people try to be objective, which means leaving out the subjective (or trying to "balance" it with subjective quotes that pull 180 degree in the other direction). The problem is, a significant portion of truth is subjective, and if you leave it out, the little rump "objective" remnant is a distortion, often bearing little resemblance to the truth.
If you are honest, you will say subjective things. To aspire to absolute objectivity is to lie by omission.
Anyway, I like his distinction between being nonpartisan and being "objective." Although I’m bothered by the fact that he finds "party preference" acceptable, I suppose he’d be welcome to join us — seeing as how to reject him would be to enforce "fundamental, nonnegotiable tenets," and we don’t hold with that.
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