Subverting Sensationalism, or 10 Ways to Lose Weight Fast!
It’s the nature of media to be sensational. That is their goal: to attract readers, listeners, viewers, you name it. Whatever form their content is presented in, the writers’ goal is to attract the attention of anyone and everyone. The word “sensational” may have negative connotations for some, conjuring up images of click-bait headlines and listicles, but I mean it in the simplest possible way. Media is sensational in the sense that everyone who works for a particular news organization, be it the New York Times or the Jacobin or Fox News or InfoWars, has a goal of attracting readership or viewership or listenership.
All media outlets pursue this attention differently, of course. Some of them truly do “sensationalize” the news more than others do. Some of them are more committed to journalistic integrity, to reporting the facts. But no matter what aim these media outlets have, and no matter what level of integrity they possess, there is always a decision being made about what to publish. There is always a decision being made about what content to present as “newsworthy”.
This commonsense revelation means, of course, that even seemingly non-partisan news sources like FiveThirtyEight have their own ideological spin. (For what it’s worth, it isn’t difficult to perceive that ideological spin if you listen to a FiveThirtyEight podcast.) And that’s fine! We often forget that news organizations who present themselves as “non-partisan” and “objective” still, nonetheless, employ human beings who have real, and mutable, political and social opinions. It’s simply naive to assume that “unbiased” news organizations exist, because no unbiased human beings exist. No matter how objective you may be when evaluating a particular bit of news or a particular fact you’ve come across, there was a decision that was made, either by you or by someone else, to pay attention to that particular bit of news or that particular fact. And given that there were also other bits of news you could’ve paid attention to instead, you’ve made a decision to focus on this one.
That’s not to say this is a strong bias, obviously. It simply means that the idea of journalists being unbiased is a naive relic of the age-old Western focus on perfect rationalism. Western Philosophy since Aristotle has, for the most part, held up the perfectly rational human as the ideal man. (And I’m using “man” purposefully here, because the exclusion of women from philosophy is insidious and pervasive.) Any college student pursuing philosophy has had to take a course on logic, and it is often, at many universities, one of the foundational courses of the discipline. There’s nothing wrong with Logic as a mental exercise, but when we come to view all human beings as the prototypical Homo Economicus, that’s when we run into problems. We’re not perfectly rational, and we’re not perfectly objective, and we can’t be. No matter how hard we try, we cannot help but present issues in a way that at least mildly reflects our own worldview.
The problem comes when we start associating objectivity with news that we’ve garnered from sites which are not, in fact, objective. And the problem isn’t that the sites are presenting the facts incorrectly — unless the site is InfoWars or Fox — but rather that we think they are being objective when they are actually still choosing to present a particular issue with a particular spin.
My point, in short, is that we need to stop looking for “objective” news sources. They do not exist, and they cannot exist. What we need to do, instead, is branch out and read a variety of sources! Read the Jacobin and read Fox News. Read The Intercept and InfoWars, read CurrentAffairs, read the New York Times and Vox and random blogs on Medium. We aren’t going to find a perfectly objective news source, so if we want to try to get a well-rounded view of the world then our personal list of news sources must be, in turn, well-rounded.
You don’t have to agree with a news source to read an article and find some interesting points. Even if you’re a liberal like me, you can still read Fox and not bleed from your eyeballs. Yes, a lot of it is terrible, but it helps to expose yourself to opinions that diverge from your own. You don’t need to agree with it, but it’s a good mental exercise to read an article you don’t agree with and find ways to argue against it. That’ll get you about as close to Objectivity as possible, frankly.
