Star-Ledger: Baraka the threat vs Jeffries the scholar. Yikes.
I’ve taught journalism at a variety of colleges in New Jersey and I can’t resist offering lessons in the craft now that I have my own blog. Today’s lesson is how to deal with claims of objectivity, especially from main stream media.
First, this: I am not objective and I don’t pretend to be. I have opinions—for almost 50 years I was paid by The Star-Ledger to express them. I won’t stop now. Anyone who has read “Bob Braun’s Ledger” as a blog, FB page or Twitter knows I have opinions and they know what they are. I am not ashamed of them. I am proud of them and I will use them to inform my reporting and writing. Slap me if I screw up facts but my opinions are at least as valuable as anyone else’s.
My problem is with main-stream media outlets that pretend to objectivity and attempt to create trust on the grounds they are reporting only objective truth. There is, of course, no such thing as objectivity in media. There is fairness, maybe, but every time a reporter sits down to write a piece and an editor reads it and approves it (after assigning it), these basic decisions are riddled with subjective judgments.
Let’s talk about the way The Star-Ledger has covered the school crisis in Newark. To the extent it has covered it at all, the stories appear to be straightforward and unbiased. But here’s the rub—The Star-Ledger has hardly covered it at all and that boycotting of important stories is a subjective judgment. It is a judgment that says to its readers: “We do not believe what is happening in Newark is important enough to