News.com.au

By Andrew Bolt

Former Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes, a Leftist like every one of the shows’ seven hosts, hears it finally from someone he’s obliged to treat seriously:

The occasion was an all-day Public Knowledge Forum put on by Sydney University’s United States Studies Centre. The topic was the changing face of modern journalism. My fellow panellists were foreign policy guru, blogger and all-round egghead Walter Russell Mead; and academic, media contrarian, blogger and tweeter extraordinaire, Jay Rosen of New York University.

Both made this point: what many of us think of as the ‘’new journalism’’ — the opinionated, argumentative, passionate and unpredictable world of the blogosphere — is actually old journalism in modern clothes…

Rosen contrasts that with what he calls ‘’new testament journalism’’: the more staid, more professional, more ‘’responsible’’ journalism of the great newspaper chains and broadcasters, which claims to publish the ‘’objective’’ truth…

In a recent and fascinating online exchange, Greenwald ... [said]: ‘’This model rests on a false conceit. Human beings are not objectivity-driven machines. We all intrinsically perceive and process the world through subjective prisms. What is the value in pretending otherwise?‘’

Holmes still can’t believe it. Not really:

Well, it’s a familiar enough meme, these days, and there’s a lot of truth to the critique. But, as I pointed out, the public broadcasters ... are legally bound to pursue the holy grail of unbiased reporting, however chimerical it may be. The ABC Act enjoins the ABC’s board ‘’to ensure that the gathering and presentation by the corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism’’.

But what else but bias — or a “subjective prism” — could explain some of the absurd rulings even by the ABC’s “Fact Check” unit?

But don’t say that to a Sydney University crowd:

To Kissel, [impartial journalism] is self-evidently a hopeless ambition, as well as an absurd one. Indeed, state-backed broadcasters in a democracy are ‘’an oxymoronic concept par excellence’’. But when she made a similar point in the forum, a discernible mutter of protest rolled through the audience. She tweeted later:

‘’Fascinating that my critique of @ABCAustralia received the biggest rise out of the crowd at #pkf13. Does no one here question it?’’

This post was originally published at News.com.au