IT’S AN IDEA SO CRAZY, IT JUST MIGHT WORK:
In 2006, Walter Cronkite told PBS that, “I’m a liberal, but I’m not biased. Seriously. … [ellipses in original — Ed] A journalist covering politics, most of us are aware of the necessity to try to be sure we’re unbiased in our reporting. That’s one of the fundamentals of good journalism. We all have our likes and our dislikes. But … when we’re doing news — when we’re doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we’re doing the daily news, covering politics — it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.”
In 2019, long after RatherGate ended his career at CBS, Dan Rather was still muttering boilerplate such as, “As a lifetime journalist I can say I can only speak for myself: you do the best you can realizing you’re going to make your mistakes… that’s the test point of trying to stay objective and try to stay unbiased.”
Nobody believes old media claims about “objectivity.” Tell me your worldview so that I can take that into account when you’re presenting me a story.