The Myth of Objectivity
Posted on | October 10, 2011 | No Comments
At the urging of my father, I just read a piece by the late Gonzo Journalist Hunter S. Thompson written in 1994 on the funeral of Richard Nixon. (You can find it HERE.) I think I had seen and read the piece before, but had a fairly strong reaction to it this time.
I have read some Thompson, most notably Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I doubt that history will much remember him as Thompson describes him. He will probably be considered a flawed, perhaps even tragic – in the classical sense – hero, and has already been compared to some of the tragic heroes of the Greeks and Shakespeare. He died being thought of as the elder statesman who “Brought China to the table”, after all. He will no more be thought of by history as an evil man as Johnson will be and I think there are parallels.
As my father suggested, it was a very well written piece. It was also filled with the personality of the writer, which many think of as simply bad journalism. Even though this is more of an editorial or opinion piece, most of his writing had the same thought process in evidence. It is part of why Thompson was called “Gonzo”. I used to distrust journalism with a personal bias. I naively thought that the solemn duty of the journalist was to stay out of the written work, to just present the facts. Now I distrust any that doesn’t have and admit to it. The bit I missed from “just present the facts” is “as he sees them.”
We can’t write without ourselves being in the piece, it is a physical impossibility, and it is imperative to acknowledge that. It is why any journalism that calls itself “fair and balanced” can’t be. There is always a slant. The slant isn’t necessarily a political one (even in today’s hyper-political climate), but the thoughts, opinions and experience of the writer will always influence the statement of fact in a piece.
We are filtering beings, we humans, we learn of necessity to filter out so we can cope with the amount of input we get in our lives. We learn to do this early and on a very deep, absolutely subconscious level. Sometimes we are aware of the filtering, usually not. But as we grow, make decisions, form opinions, learn about our environment, both close in and widely ranging, these thing contribute to the filtering we do until there is nothing that we can think or even see that hasn’t passed through that filter in some way. It can not be objective because, on a very deep level, we can not.
There is nothing wrong or scary about this. We just need to realize it so that, when we read what others have written or even what we ourselves write, we know that the facts laid out have been sifted through. Filtering, by definition, leaves things behind and when we know this, we can also know that no piece of writing, no statement of fact, no fiction or journalistic effort can be truly objective.
Once we know that, we can form our own opinions based on our own filters.
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