Btw, my old newspaper seems obsessed with stories of women losing weight, which fall under the heading of “fitness.” But it no longer has anyone covering health news. Thus, losing 40 pounds gets in print, but there’s no story on a groundbreaking clinical trial on ovarian cancer in our city.

@ Nicole – don’t your newspapers have acknowledged biases like UK papers do? How do you know which ones to avoid otherwise?!

No, our newspapers do NOT have acknowledged leaninggs. Most of the newspapers in America are owned by a very small group of people; like 5 people. It is one reason why Americans appear so foolish to the rest of the world: our news sources are, for the most part, pro-corporation propaganda. Most major cities in America have ONE newspaper, rather than two or more as was the case a hundred years ago. There is literally NO voice in America for labor, all the newspapers are Capital-owned and favor that viewpoint. Only a total radical like me even sees this as a problem.

The most intelligent/progressive Americans get their news over the internet from foreign sources. I find that Indian newspapers often report more fully on American politics than our papers do. The BBC is not only head and shoulders, but an entire human length above our news services.

In the end, the hate mail the piece generated was roughly equally divided between “Obviously you’re pro-abortion” and “Obviously you’re anti-abortion”. She decided this meant she had done a good, objective handling of the subject, because she’d pissed off both sides :)

Objectivity doesn’t mean you report as if you were a robot.

Objectivity means you don’t allow yourself to be manipulated by a source or sources to promote their ideas and opinions as absolutes while minimizing the voices of thse who disagree with them.

I’m a gay woman with leftist leanings, and I coordinate a religion section for a newspaper in the Bible belt. I ask questions, challenge people when I think they’re shoveling shit at me and then ask more questions. I’ve got a number of sources who are sure that people like me are going to hell. I’ve yet to have any of them insist I’m not being objective.

Actually, even if we *did* live in a vacuum, we’d probably still have them.

@ Nicole – don’t your newspapers have acknowledged biases like UK papers do? How do you know which ones to avoid otherwise?!

Maybe I’ll write up something for my LJ userinfo (or my blog, if I ever bother updating it) describing my biases and how I’m involved in what I write about. I like that kind of honesty. It also seems like it’d be much easier to sustain over time — you don’t have to do increasingly complex contortions to try and remain “objective”, or even to agree with the same opinions you had last week or last year.

Which is one of my current grumps about politics. Is no one allowed to change his/her mind? What’s wrong with a simple statement like “Yes, I used to support that, but I looked more deeply into the issue and I no longer support it”?

This is one of the big arguments that crop up time and time again in feminist research methods — everyone is biased so quite trying to pretend that they are not.

I get so fed up with people going ‘but you can’t really talk about… rape/misogyny/catcalling/discrimination because you’re a woman and so you’re not able to look at it objectively’. WHY is it always the white male who is ‘objective’ and everyone else who’s ‘irrationally biased’ *shakes head sadly*