August 21, 2025 • 22 mins
James, Gare, and Robert discuss the concept of objectivity in legacy media and the issues it raises.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black-journalists-coronavirus.html
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
We had a very funny introduction. It was really good.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Yeah, it referenced our company sexual harassment protocols. It was hilarious.
You're never gonna hear it. We weren't recording.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I was recording, so you can hear my section. Okay, Yeah,
if you can just accept what Garrison said without context
and we'll open with that, that'll be great. Yeah. That
is a classic Robert Evans intro. You just did it.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I feel like it always comes from inside.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about journalistic objectivity,
that's right, a thing that we've just demonstrated perfectly.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, yeah, that's the professional media class. So let's have
a little talk about media objectivity. Right. It's been a
major tenet of traditional legacy media that they must remain unbiased.
This hasn't all been the case in the United States.
Right used to have explicitly partisan news sources, which we
have now with Fox News, I guess. But that's why
(01:08):
you have newspapers like I think Saint Louis has a
Saint Louis Democrat or the so and so Republican like
that they would be very explicitly a partisan newspaper. It's
only really when journalism sort of took on this strong
professional and I mean professional here in terms of like
the professions right, like law, accounting, jobs that are associated
with university education, and a class identity, that it started
(01:33):
to assert this kind of it's an attempt to appear
rational and scientific in its methodologies, right. And one of
the ways that journalism did this was to talk about objectivity.
I should indicate here that objectivity is supposed to be
a means of verifying information. I like that we should
objectively check that what we have written is correct.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
The example I always give is that if I'm in
a protest scene where there's a clash between proud boys
and you know, a group of leftists, and you know,
someone on the left pulls out a can of mace
and sprays it first, that's objectively what happened. Now, that
doesn't mean that that's the only thing I report. For example,
if the person they maceed is somebody who has been
(02:14):
like harassing those individuals online for weeks, or has been
doxing them or assaulted them at previous like, all of
that is like relevant context, but it doesn't change what
objectively happened in that instant, right, Like, it's not on
me to pretend that I think these sides are equal,
but it is on me to accurately report like what happens. Yes,
(02:34):
And I think one of the one of the areas
in which a lot of people, especially when we were
talking about, like, you know, situations like this, a lot
of folks in kind of legacy media get stuff wrong
is they think that all that matters is what happens
in that moment, right, and what happened previously, what's happened
in other engagements, what's happened like over you know, the
last two or three years of however long the conflict's
(02:56):
been going on that city is immaterial. Well, all that
matters is what happened in the second when that reporter
was scene. And if you're if you're thinking that way,
you're going to miss more than someone who comes in
with just an outright bias, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, And like I think very often it's seen as
kind of instead of being like a value of the
outlet in the way it verifies information, it's seeing as
being a personal kind of like quality that journalists should
have in every aspect of their lives. Yeah, Like I'm
aware that it's some of the big legacy broadsheets in
the US, like you can't attend to protest unless you
(03:31):
are covering the protest, right.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
And there's even that famous case of that journalist being like,
I don't vote because I think that that would be
a violation of like my objectivity.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that. I got it forgotten
about that one.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Like you're allowed to have opinions, that's just not supposed
to be the entire basis of your reporting, you.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Know exactly, Yeah, Like, and I think sometimes because people
always do have opinions, right, but the opinions that are
conceived of as neutral and the ones that are conceived
of as being subjective are very telling, right, Like, the
media for a long time has been the domain of educated,
(04:08):
older white men, like people like me. I guess I'm
not old, but getting that way. And it also has
been the domain of like capital in the state, right,
like Jeffrey Bezos owned several newspapers pro market biases, pro
capitalism biases, pro state biases, that those are not really
investigated much in the media in the way that other
(04:29):
biases might be. Right, It's also created this idea that
the media always needs to shoot for the middle in
any given discussion, which I kind of want to investigate
a bit, when Donald Trump says something which is overt,
like Donald Trump has said things which are nativist, right,
nativism is a form of racism. Donald Trump therefore has
(04:49):
said racist shit. The way that this is far too
often treated in the legacy media is it's the racist
shit that Donald Trump said, correct, or like, maybe we
should consider this racist thing that so and so has said, right,
rather than this shit is racist Donald Trump has said
of shit that it's racist, or other members of the
Republican Party. All this serves to do is when we
(05:13):
have a topic and the people in Congress anchor themselves
on the very far right, what is acceptable discourse, the
media then moves discourse to the right so that position
is in the center, right, it serves to ratchet that
overton window to the right. I'm demonstrating this for my
colleagues with hand signals, which of course only two of
the hundreds of thousands of people listening to me will
(05:36):
be able to see the right way to our podcast.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Yeah, it was a very compelling mime of a ratchet
like it looked like you basically were doing it. I
could not tell.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I couldn't tell the difference. No, that's why we call
you ratchet. Straps out.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Got me a ratchet, Jimmy. Yeah, it's This podcast is
sponsored by Invisible Ratchet. Now it was time to pivot
to add It's not time to figure to add yet.
I think we should talk about the way other professions
concerned with the truths deal with this topic, right, because
journalism is pretty much unique and considering objectivity something that
(06:14):
we as individuals have to embody in every action that
we take. And I guess the most relevant one will
be academia, which is something else I am unfortunate enough
to have participated in for far too much of my
adult life. So academia still not great, But we have
accepted that everyone is biased in academia. Right, We rely on,
(06:37):
among many other things, something called standpoint theory, right, which
is a cornerstone of modern feminist thought. Most of you
will be aware of it, even if you're not aware
of it. Basically, it holds that we see the world
differently based on where we see it from. Our gender, sexuality, raise, ethnicity, experience, age,
and a million other things impact the truth we know
in the world. We experience and standpoint theory posits that
(06:58):
perhaps people not from a certain threating may have valuable
insights into it. Right, So, sometimes the outsider perspective is
a valuable one. But also people from that setting may
see things outsiders may not see, and we have to
acknowledge those biases, right, and then continue to tell the truth.
How do we tell the truth? In academia? We do
(07:18):
something called peer review. Peer review is bad. Peer review
strongly reinforces the status quote right. I will give one example.
I once had a journal article, right for a history journal,
killed in peer review. The piece was about the nineteen
oh nine tour of Catalonia that was a bicycle competition
(07:39):
for those of you who aren't familiar. It was killed
because my media analysis didn't mention television coverage. The television
was kind of crudely invented in the nineteen twenties, and
did it become widely available until the nineteen forties, Right, Like,
this is not a reasonable objection. Nonetheless, someone was able
to kill my piece because of it, because that's how
peer review worked. Right. The people who are as people
(08:00):
who are in petitions of power can kill your shit
if they want to, and they can give the most
ludicrous region. That is how peer of view, among other things,
reinforces state just quo. Right. The other thing that we
do in academias we declare our conflicts of interest, and
this is something we don't do in journalism, right, Like
outlets may have a conflict of interest policy. But again,
(08:22):
like conflicts of interest aren't explicitly declared in a piece
like you wouldn't see sometimes NPR does it.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Actually, Yeah, I mean a number of outlets do declare like,
for example, this outlet is owned by someone who has
a financial interest in the company we're reporting on, or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, if the Washington Post is doing a story about
Jeff Bezos or Amazon, yeah, usually they will say in
the bottom or the top that the paper is owned
by said said figure.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah. Where it becomes more murky is like sometimes people
have a financial interest or if something is your beat, right,
you may have other fire financial interest within that beat.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Well, and there's there's the very common case of people,
especially now within kind of the sub stack journalism, being
like friends and social with people that they are reporting
on and not disclosing to their wider audience.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, like access journalism more generally ready. Yeah, Like the
way I got this piece was by being invited to
the drinks party, And if I say anything I'm kind
about this person, I won't be invited to the drinks party. Yeah,
Or simply the conflict of interest that is presented by
the more ludicrous my headline, the more people will click
on this website, and the more time they will spend
on the page, and the more advative you they might generate.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Yeah, And that's really the largest issue with modern journalism
is that that kind of determines almost everything for an outlet,
is like what's what's going to get clicks, what's going
to rile people up as much as possible, And that
is that that doesn't count as financial interest, right, Like
the fact that the outlet has invested financial interest in
keeping you on the page as often and as long
(09:57):
as possible doesn't count as like a conflictive interest in
any way. And that's kind of one of the fundamental issues. Whereas,
like a lot of times, a lot of outlets won't let,
for example, a black journalist report on a black man
being murdered by the police, right because they see that
as like an inherent conflict of interest, and the gap
between those two things is where a lot of the
(10:18):
real problems, a lot of the worst problems in modern
journalism arise.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, talking of problems, we need to pay to ads, sure,
all right, we are back. Part of this also manifests
in like journalists being supposed to not have any individual
(10:44):
opinions about anything, even if it's irrelevant to that beat.
This has been the case for a lot of people
regarding the genocide of Palestinian people. Right, Like you could
be the weekend editor, you could write about brunch, and
if you work at certain outlets, you are like under
pain of losing your job, not allowed to post to
(11:05):
what is happening in Gaza. It is a genocide to
take a stance on these issues, right, And that is bad.
Like journalists are human beings too, and it's ridiculous to
suggest that that we shouldn't or can't have opinions on
these things and still do good reporting, right we can.
We just have to make sure that the reporting itself
is accurate. Sometimes what this leads to is like like
(11:31):
what I guess another, like Rubbie, you spoke about it,
that like the inherent conflict of interests that like traffic
on a website presents for journalism. Another like inherent issue
is that like every source is seen as biased, right,
Like you said, like black folks might not be allowed
to report on black men being shown by the cops,
accept state sources, which are far too often seen as
(11:52):
speaking the verbatim truth, right, Well, this is what the
police said. Yes, yeah, that is how we get I
guess A pretty good example of this, I'll link to
it in the show notes is a piece I wrote
five years ago I think about police officers overdosing on fentanyl.
Some of you will be familiar with this, some of
you will not, But it is not possible to overdose
(12:14):
on fentanyl just from being in its presence, like in
an outdoor area next to a thing that has fentel
in it. The piece I wrote dealt with the San
Diego Union Tribune. Who I mean, this was a spectacular instance,
I guess, of journalists like serving as police snographers. What
happened here is that the police had produced an edited
(12:35):
video with like music and shit of this supposed overdose.
Right of a young cop who was like, I don't
know what they call it. He's like apprentice with an
older cop, like the with a more experienced cop and
they were going around doing cop stuff. They found some stuff.
They tested it for fentanyl, and this guy collapses. The
younger cop, the older cop gives him several nacans. It's
(12:58):
not just waste some yeah, no, just like I think
there was one instant where someone received seven knock ants,
which like, like, that's a threat to your fucking nasal
integrity if nothing else. Yeah, if knokin doesn't work the
first time, like I.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Mean, people do sometimes often it's not especially like with
serious ods. They'll often put people like in the hospital
on drips, but you would have to take a massive dose,
not just be near fucking.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Fin Yeah, yeah, to like be like I think this instance,
like they were outside testing it in like the boot
of a car, Like it's ludicrous thing that you and like,
it would be good if they familiarize themselves with some
of the what an overdose looks like. Right, Yeah, And
I'm mixed.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
If they weren't cops, I'd respect the desire to like
time theft from work, because I think that's what a
lot of this is. It's like, oh shit, if I
have an overdose, like I get to stay out of
work a couple.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Of days with day that's what that's a that's a framing.
I'm amenable to you. Unfortunately, they are gods. Ver If
you're a reporter, though, like it is absolutely on you to, oh,
this person having an overdose? What are the symptoms of
an overdose? What does an overdose look like? Should I
talk to a medical professional? Or you could just ask
(14:16):
the perlice information officer who shared this with you, how
did you verify this as an overdose? With whom did
you discuss the toxicology report in this case? That information
wasn't available right the way I was able to obtain
that just to do I guess clarity is first of all,
I saw the publication where they didn't mention any fact
checking that they'd done. You can also pra the emails
(14:40):
to the police as well as from the police, right,
so you can see if other reporters have done fact
checking that way or have asked any follow up questions
that way I done, that they would have found out
that you say that you can't overdose in fentanyl this way.
They didn't even try. And like both sides this, I
guess like sometimes you'll see outlets doing that now, like
this cop overdose from fentanyl but doctors say they can't.
(15:01):
Like it's a which I still think is an absolutely
ludicrous practice. Right. That's like saying this person tried to fly,
but you know that people say gravity will make them
fall to the ground, like one of these things we
know to be true. So I guess what I would
propose we do instead of this ludicrous practice of like
(15:23):
pretending to be objective about everything all the time, is
that we are honest about our biases, honest about our
conflict of interests. We're honest about like our standpoint, and
then we do reporting, which is obviously verifiable, right, And
that means, like you'll see that at the end of
these episodes, right, we share our sources that we used
(15:43):
after we're try and communicate where we got information from
and how we got it. And I think we should
strive for moral clarity in the way we say things
instead of driving to this mill ground. So, like, what
do I mean by moral clarity? I mean saying the
cops killed someone, not officer involved shooting. Right. If you
work with fucking words and you find yourself writing something
(16:04):
as convoluted as officer involved shooting, then you have strayed
from the foundational reason for journalism existing. Yeah, you have
gone beyond God's light. Yeah yeah, yeah, you live in
the darkness. There is I think a place for fact checkers.
I think people got a bit carried away with fact checking.
(16:26):
I don't quite know how to phrase this correctly. I
had an experience once where I had written a piece.
The fact checking of that piece centered on the fact
that I had used the noun beach chair to refer
to this chair. Yes, the fact checker believed that it
was a lawn chair. To me, did not impact the
(16:48):
overall thrust of the piece, right, like the nature of
the chair. Unfortunately, that ended up killing the story. We
ran out of time to go over the court documents
because of the nature of the chair discussion. And I'm
not sure that's what we need to do.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
No, I mean, and I think the other and probably
larger problem with fact checking is fact checking is an
in in and of itself is ha. I showed that
they were wrong. I checked the fact where it's like, yeah,
but what they wrote got out to thirty million people
and your fact check got out to like sixty So
what you did didn't really matter. And what we should
probably be doing is looking at an intervention higher up
(17:25):
on the line to stop the bullshit from getting out,
rather than being obsessed with well I fact checked it, like, well,
but that didn't really help you know, yeah, right, just
at what point do we give that up?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Is pointless? Yeah, you are like not even a footnote
to this other thing that this person.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
No, we need to the intervention needs to be happening
earlier because the bullshit is still getting out.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah, absolutely, And this happens like we're inly this a
bizarre situation where like writing outlets can say what the
fuck they want, right like, Like we have whole massive
media empires going in on this idea that the twenty
twenty election was stolen. Then we have like centrist outlets
instead of being like, no, the election wasn't solen. That
(18:10):
that's bullshit, constantly trying to like investigate those claims as
if they were credible and useful, rather than illustrating why
they should be dismissed and then moving on, right like,
instead of investigating why this conspiracy is so important. We
see that a lot with immigration right now, but we
saw it a ton in the presidential debates, right Like,
(18:32):
It's a good example of what you were saying JD.
Vance can just lie and even Donald Trump actually can
lie about people eating dogs and cats and it doesn't
hugely matter if an hour later and use outlet tweets, oh,
we fact check him, and it's not okay. Right, You're
still broadcast to millions of people that Haitian migrants eat
dogs and cats and that's not true. And I think
(18:54):
we need to strive for something that it's closer to
the truth, and it's closer to fairness, and it gives
us moral clarity because what we're all doing right now,
what the legacy media doing is doing right now, is
like woefully inadequate to meet the moment. Yeah, I mean
I agree.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
I think where I don't actually know how to solve
things is the incentive structure, Yeah, is so broken. And
to an extent, all of this talk about objectivity. And
when I say that, I mean, like the talk that
outlets and editors have about objectivity, is there more than
anything to obscure the fact that the economics of journalism
(19:33):
make it almost impossible for it to be anything but
a willing agent of disinformation. That's the real issue is
you can have the Washington Post, and you can have
the New York Times host good reporting, but a huge
amount of their income will always come from having columnists
whose entire job is to piss people off or to
(19:57):
stoke the egos of people in power. And I don't
know that the good work those outlets does outweighs the
crap that they spill into the public discourse, because that's
what's incentivized. And so I think to an extent, there's
almost no point in actually engaging with the objectivity debate
(20:21):
with the people who are pushing it, because they're not
pushing it honestly, they're pushing it as a way to
obscure the fact that they make their money the same
way Mark Zuckerberg makes his money, which is by spreading fear, anger,
and doubt.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah. Yeah, that's the bad op ed industrial complex. Like
I've been guilty of that. Right, you see a fucking
headline on social media and you're like, that's bullshit, and
then you click and read. Right. I used to like,
when I was a little baby, channel let's engage with
this and be like that's bullshit because and I try
and write about it somewhere or post it on social media.
But I have come to realize and in doing that,
(20:56):
I'm doing exactly what they want me to do, which
is in you sending people to their website to click
on adverts and to make the money. So I think
it's better that we do not do that. But yeah,
that is the fundamental conceit of journalism right now. How
it pays the bills is keeping you on that page,
and a way it keeps you on that page is
making you angry. There is like a model, I think.
(21:19):
Then you see this like in community small community newspapers
right now, like I guess outlets like Left Coast Right
Watching in California and Oregon, where like people genuinely buy
building trust and telling the truth, gain the support of
their communities and financed by them. But I mean the
orders of magnitude and income difference are like they're not
(21:42):
making Washington Post money over at Left Coast Right Watch.
I know this should be true. So yeah, pretty fucked
and it will only get worse. I think, like, as
as as we continue to slide into the post truth
fascism world, I can't really our legacy outlets doing much
(22:03):
about it. If all they ever going to do is
strive for the middle ground.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
On this, Well, all right, Okay, everybody, all right, you
go have a good day and now, world, It Could Happen.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
We had a very funny introduction. It was really good.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Yeah, it referenced our company sexual harassment protocols. It was hilarious.
You're never gonna hear it. We weren't recording.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I was recording, so you can hear my section. Okay, Yeah,
if you can just accept what Garrison said without context
and we'll open with that, that'll be great. Yeah. That
is a classic Robert Evans intro. You just did it.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I feel like it always comes from inside.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about journalistic objectivity,
that's right, a thing that we've just demonstrated perfectly.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, yeah, that's the professional media class. So let's have
a little talk about media objectivity. Right. It's been a
major tenet of traditional legacy media that they must remain unbiased.
This hasn't all been the case in the United States.
Right used to have explicitly partisan news sources, which we
have now with Fox News, I guess. But that's why
(01:08):
you have newspapers like I think Saint Louis has a
Saint Louis Democrat or the so and so Republican like
that they would be very explicitly a partisan newspaper. It's
only really when journalism sort of took on this strong
professional and I mean professional here in terms of like
the professions right, like law, accounting, jobs that are associated
with university education, and a class identity, that it started
(01:33):
to assert this kind of it's an attempt to appear
rational and scientific in its methodologies, right. And one of
the ways that journalism did this was to talk about objectivity.
I should indicate here that objectivity is supposed to be
a means of verifying information. I like that we should
objectively check that what we have written is correct.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
The example I always give is that if I'm in
a protest scene where there's a clash between proud boys
and you know, a group of leftists, and you know,
someone on the left pulls out a can of mace
and sprays it first, that's objectively what happened. Now, that
doesn't mean that that's the only thing I report. For example,
if the person they maceed is somebody who has been
(02:14):
like harassing those individuals online for weeks, or has been
doxing them or assaulted them at previous like, all of
that is like relevant context, but it doesn't change what
objectively happened in that instant, right, Like, it's not on
me to pretend that I think these sides are equal,
but it is on me to accurately report like what happens. Yes,
(02:34):
And I think one of the one of the areas
in which a lot of people, especially when we were
talking about, like, you know, situations like this, a lot
of folks in kind of legacy media get stuff wrong
is they think that all that matters is what happens
in that moment, right, and what happened previously, what's happened
in other engagements, what's happened like over you know, the
last two or three years of however long the conflict's
(02:56):
been going on that city is immaterial. Well, all that
matters is what happened in the second when that reporter
was scene. And if you're if you're thinking that way,
you're going to miss more than someone who comes in
with just an outright bias, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, And like I think very often it's seen as
kind of instead of being like a value of the
outlet in the way it verifies information, it's seeing as
being a personal kind of like quality that journalists should
have in every aspect of their lives. Yeah, Like I'm
aware that it's some of the big legacy broadsheets in
the US, like you can't attend to protest unless you
(03:31):
are covering the protest, right.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
And there's even that famous case of that journalist being like,
I don't vote because I think that that would be
a violation of like my objectivity.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that. I got it forgotten
about that one.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Like you're allowed to have opinions, that's just not supposed
to be the entire basis of your reporting, you.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Know exactly, Yeah, Like, and I think sometimes because people
always do have opinions, right, but the opinions that are
conceived of as neutral and the ones that are conceived
of as being subjective are very telling, right, Like, the
media for a long time has been the domain of educated,
(04:08):
older white men, like people like me. I guess I'm
not old, but getting that way. And it also has
been the domain of like capital in the state, right,
like Jeffrey Bezos owned several newspapers pro market biases, pro
capitalism biases, pro state biases, that those are not really
investigated much in the media in the way that other
(04:29):
biases might be. Right, It's also created this idea that
the media always needs to shoot for the middle in
any given discussion, which I kind of want to investigate
a bit, when Donald Trump says something which is overt,
like Donald Trump has said things which are nativist, right,
nativism is a form of racism. Donald Trump therefore has
(04:49):
said racist shit. The way that this is far too
often treated in the legacy media is it's the racist
shit that Donald Trump said, correct, or like, maybe we
should consider this racist thing that so and so has said, right,
rather than this shit is racist Donald Trump has said
of shit that it's racist, or other members of the
Republican Party. All this serves to do is when we
(05:13):
have a topic and the people in Congress anchor themselves
on the very far right, what is acceptable discourse, the
media then moves discourse to the right so that position
is in the center, right, it serves to ratchet that
overton window to the right. I'm demonstrating this for my
colleagues with hand signals, which of course only two of
the hundreds of thousands of people listening to me will
(05:36):
be able to see the right way to our podcast.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Yeah, it was a very compelling mime of a ratchet
like it looked like you basically were doing it. I
could not tell.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I couldn't tell the difference. No, that's why we call
you ratchet. Straps out.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Got me a ratchet, Jimmy. Yeah, it's This podcast is
sponsored by Invisible Ratchet. Now it was time to pivot
to add It's not time to figure to add yet.
I think we should talk about the way other professions
concerned with the truths deal with this topic, right, because
journalism is pretty much unique and considering objectivity something that
(06:14):
we as individuals have to embody in every action that
we take. And I guess the most relevant one will
be academia, which is something else I am unfortunate enough
to have participated in for far too much of my
adult life. So academia still not great, But we have
accepted that everyone is biased in academia. Right, We rely on,
(06:37):
among many other things, something called standpoint theory, right, which
is a cornerstone of modern feminist thought. Most of you
will be aware of it, even if you're not aware
of it. Basically, it holds that we see the world
differently based on where we see it from. Our gender, sexuality, raise, ethnicity, experience, age,
and a million other things impact the truth we know
in the world. We experience and standpoint theory posits that
(06:58):
perhaps people not from a certain threating may have valuable
insights into it. Right, So, sometimes the outsider perspective is
a valuable one. But also people from that setting may
see things outsiders may not see, and we have to
acknowledge those biases, right, and then continue to tell the truth.
How do we tell the truth? In academia? We do
(07:18):
something called peer review. Peer review is bad. Peer review
strongly reinforces the status quote right. I will give one example.
I once had a journal article, right for a history journal,
killed in peer review. The piece was about the nineteen
oh nine tour of Catalonia that was a bicycle competition
(07:39):
for those of you who aren't familiar. It was killed
because my media analysis didn't mention television coverage. The television
was kind of crudely invented in the nineteen twenties, and
did it become widely available until the nineteen forties, Right, Like,
this is not a reasonable objection. Nonetheless, someone was able
to kill my piece because of it, because that's how
peer review worked. Right. The people who are as people
(08:00):
who are in petitions of power can kill your shit
if they want to, and they can give the most
ludicrous region. That is how peer of view, among other things,
reinforces state just quo. Right. The other thing that we
do in academias we declare our conflicts of interest, and
this is something we don't do in journalism, right, Like
outlets may have a conflict of interest policy. But again,
(08:22):
like conflicts of interest aren't explicitly declared in a piece
like you wouldn't see sometimes NPR does it.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Actually, Yeah, I mean a number of outlets do declare like,
for example, this outlet is owned by someone who has
a financial interest in the company we're reporting on, or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, if the Washington Post is doing a story about
Jeff Bezos or Amazon, yeah, usually they will say in
the bottom or the top that the paper is owned
by said said figure.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah. Where it becomes more murky is like sometimes people
have a financial interest or if something is your beat, right,
you may have other fire financial interest within that beat.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Well, and there's there's the very common case of people,
especially now within kind of the sub stack journalism, being
like friends and social with people that they are reporting
on and not disclosing to their wider audience.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, like access journalism more generally ready. Yeah, Like the
way I got this piece was by being invited to
the drinks party, And if I say anything I'm kind
about this person, I won't be invited to the drinks party. Yeah,
Or simply the conflict of interest that is presented by
the more ludicrous my headline, the more people will click
on this website, and the more time they will spend
on the page, and the more advative you they might generate.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Yeah, And that's really the largest issue with modern journalism
is that that kind of determines almost everything for an outlet,
is like what's what's going to get clicks, what's going
to rile people up as much as possible, And that
is that that doesn't count as financial interest, right, Like
the fact that the outlet has invested financial interest in
keeping you on the page as often and as long
(09:57):
as possible doesn't count as like a conflictive interest in
any way. And that's kind of one of the fundamental issues. Whereas,
like a lot of times, a lot of outlets won't let,
for example, a black journalist report on a black man
being murdered by the police, right because they see that
as like an inherent conflict of interest, and the gap
between those two things is where a lot of the
(10:18):
real problems, a lot of the worst problems in modern
journalism arise.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, talking of problems, we need to pay to ads, sure,
all right, we are back. Part of this also manifests
in like journalists being supposed to not have any individual
(10:44):
opinions about anything, even if it's irrelevant to that beat.
This has been the case for a lot of people
regarding the genocide of Palestinian people. Right, Like you could
be the weekend editor, you could write about brunch, and
if you work at certain outlets, you are like under
pain of losing your job, not allowed to post to
(11:05):
what is happening in Gaza. It is a genocide to
take a stance on these issues, right, And that is bad.
Like journalists are human beings too, and it's ridiculous to
suggest that that we shouldn't or can't have opinions on
these things and still do good reporting, right we can.
We just have to make sure that the reporting itself
is accurate. Sometimes what this leads to is like like
(11:31):
what I guess another, like Rubbie, you spoke about it,
that like the inherent conflict of interests that like traffic
on a website presents for journalism. Another like inherent issue
is that like every source is seen as biased, right,
Like you said, like black folks might not be allowed
to report on black men being shown by the cops,
accept state sources, which are far too often seen as
(11:52):
speaking the verbatim truth, right, Well, this is what the
police said. Yes, yeah, that is how we get I
guess A pretty good example of this, I'll link to
it in the show notes is a piece I wrote
five years ago I think about police officers overdosing on fentanyl.
Some of you will be familiar with this, some of
you will not, But it is not possible to overdose
(12:14):
on fentanyl just from being in its presence, like in
an outdoor area next to a thing that has fentel
in it. The piece I wrote dealt with the San
Diego Union Tribune. Who I mean, this was a spectacular instance,
I guess, of journalists like serving as police snographers. What
happened here is that the police had produced an edited
(12:35):
video with like music and shit of this supposed overdose.
Right of a young cop who was like, I don't
know what they call it. He's like apprentice with an
older cop, like the with a more experienced cop and
they were going around doing cop stuff. They found some stuff.
They tested it for fentanyl, and this guy collapses. The
younger cop, the older cop gives him several nacans. It's
(12:58):
not just waste some yeah, no, just like I think
there was one instant where someone received seven knock ants,
which like, like, that's a threat to your fucking nasal
integrity if nothing else. Yeah, if knokin doesn't work the
first time, like I.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Mean, people do sometimes often it's not especially like with
serious ods. They'll often put people like in the hospital
on drips, but you would have to take a massive dose,
not just be near fucking.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Fin Yeah, yeah, to like be like I think this instance,
like they were outside testing it in like the boot
of a car, Like it's ludicrous thing that you and like,
it would be good if they familiarize themselves with some
of the what an overdose looks like. Right, Yeah, And
I'm mixed.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
If they weren't cops, I'd respect the desire to like
time theft from work, because I think that's what a
lot of this is. It's like, oh shit, if I
have an overdose, like I get to stay out of
work a couple.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Of days with day that's what that's a that's a framing.
I'm amenable to you. Unfortunately, they are gods. Ver If
you're a reporter, though, like it is absolutely on you to, oh,
this person having an overdose? What are the symptoms of
an overdose? What does an overdose look like? Should I
talk to a medical professional? Or you could just ask
(14:16):
the perlice information officer who shared this with you, how
did you verify this as an overdose? With whom did
you discuss the toxicology report in this case? That information
wasn't available right the way I was able to obtain
that just to do I guess clarity is first of all,
I saw the publication where they didn't mention any fact
checking that they'd done. You can also pra the emails
(14:40):
to the police as well as from the police, right,
so you can see if other reporters have done fact
checking that way or have asked any follow up questions
that way I done, that they would have found out
that you say that you can't overdose in fentanyl this way.
They didn't even try. And like both sides this, I
guess like sometimes you'll see outlets doing that now, like
this cop overdose from fentanyl but doctors say they can't.
(15:01):
Like it's a which I still think is an absolutely
ludicrous practice. Right. That's like saying this person tried to fly,
but you know that people say gravity will make them
fall to the ground, like one of these things we
know to be true. So I guess what I would
propose we do instead of this ludicrous practice of like
(15:23):
pretending to be objective about everything all the time, is
that we are honest about our biases, honest about our
conflict of interests. We're honest about like our standpoint, and
then we do reporting, which is obviously verifiable, right, And
that means, like you'll see that at the end of
these episodes, right, we share our sources that we used
(15:43):
after we're try and communicate where we got information from
and how we got it. And I think we should
strive for moral clarity in the way we say things
instead of driving to this mill ground. So, like, what
do I mean by moral clarity? I mean saying the
cops killed someone, not officer involved shooting. Right. If you
work with fucking words and you find yourself writing something
(16:04):
as convoluted as officer involved shooting, then you have strayed
from the foundational reason for journalism existing. Yeah, you have
gone beyond God's light. Yeah yeah, yeah, you live in
the darkness. There is I think a place for fact checkers.
I think people got a bit carried away with fact checking.
(16:26):
I don't quite know how to phrase this correctly. I
had an experience once where I had written a piece.
The fact checking of that piece centered on the fact
that I had used the noun beach chair to refer
to this chair. Yes, the fact checker believed that it
was a lawn chair. To me, did not impact the
(16:48):
overall thrust of the piece, right, like the nature of
the chair. Unfortunately, that ended up killing the story. We
ran out of time to go over the court documents
because of the nature of the chair discussion. And I'm
not sure that's what we need to do.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
No, I mean, and I think the other and probably
larger problem with fact checking is fact checking is an
in in and of itself is ha. I showed that
they were wrong. I checked the fact where it's like, yeah,
but what they wrote got out to thirty million people
and your fact check got out to like sixty So
what you did didn't really matter. And what we should
probably be doing is looking at an intervention higher up
(17:25):
on the line to stop the bullshit from getting out,
rather than being obsessed with well I fact checked it, like, well,
but that didn't really help you know, yeah, right, just
at what point do we give that up?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Is pointless? Yeah, you are like not even a footnote
to this other thing that this person.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
No, we need to the intervention needs to be happening
earlier because the bullshit is still getting out.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah, absolutely, And this happens like we're inly this a
bizarre situation where like writing outlets can say what the
fuck they want, right like, Like we have whole massive
media empires going in on this idea that the twenty
twenty election was stolen. Then we have like centrist outlets
instead of being like, no, the election wasn't solen. That
(18:10):
that's bullshit, constantly trying to like investigate those claims as
if they were credible and useful, rather than illustrating why
they should be dismissed and then moving on, right like,
instead of investigating why this conspiracy is so important. We
see that a lot with immigration right now, but we
saw it a ton in the presidential debates, right Like,
(18:32):
It's a good example of what you were saying JD.
Vance can just lie and even Donald Trump actually can
lie about people eating dogs and cats and it doesn't
hugely matter if an hour later and use outlet tweets, oh,
we fact check him, and it's not okay. Right, You're
still broadcast to millions of people that Haitian migrants eat
dogs and cats and that's not true. And I think
(18:54):
we need to strive for something that it's closer to
the truth, and it's closer to fairness, and it gives
us moral clarity because what we're all doing right now,
what the legacy media doing is doing right now, is
like woefully inadequate to meet the moment. Yeah, I mean
I agree.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
I think where I don't actually know how to solve
things is the incentive structure, Yeah, is so broken. And
to an extent, all of this talk about objectivity. And
when I say that, I mean, like the talk that
outlets and editors have about objectivity, is there more than
anything to obscure the fact that the economics of journalism
(19:33):
make it almost impossible for it to be anything but
a willing agent of disinformation. That's the real issue is
you can have the Washington Post, and you can have
the New York Times host good reporting, but a huge
amount of their income will always come from having columnists
whose entire job is to piss people off or to
(19:57):
stoke the egos of people in power. And I don't
know that the good work those outlets does outweighs the
crap that they spill into the public discourse, because that's
what's incentivized. And so I think to an extent, there's
almost no point in actually engaging with the objectivity debate
(20:21):
with the people who are pushing it, because they're not
pushing it honestly, they're pushing it as a way to
obscure the fact that they make their money the same
way Mark Zuckerberg makes his money, which is by spreading fear, anger,
and doubt.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah. Yeah, that's the bad op ed industrial complex. Like
I've been guilty of that. Right, you see a fucking
headline on social media and you're like, that's bullshit, and
then you click and read. Right. I used to like,
when I was a little baby, channel let's engage with
this and be like that's bullshit because and I try
and write about it somewhere or post it on social media.
But I have come to realize and in doing that,
(20:56):
I'm doing exactly what they want me to do, which
is in you sending people to their website to click
on adverts and to make the money. So I think
it's better that we do not do that. But yeah,
that is the fundamental conceit of journalism right now. How
it pays the bills is keeping you on that page,
and a way it keeps you on that page is
making you angry. There is like a model, I think.
(21:19):
Then you see this like in community small community newspapers
right now, like I guess outlets like Left Coast Right
Watching in California and Oregon, where like people genuinely buy
building trust and telling the truth, gain the support of
their communities and financed by them. But I mean the
orders of magnitude and income difference are like they're not
(21:42):
making Washington Post money over at Left Coast Right Watch.
I know this should be true. So yeah, pretty fucked
and it will only get worse. I think, like, as
as as we continue to slide into the post truth
fascism world, I can't really our legacy outlets doing much
(22:03):
about it. If all they ever going to do is
strive for the middle ground.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
On this, Well, all right, Okay, everybody, all right, you
go have a good day and now, world, It Could Happen.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for it could Happen here. Listen directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
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