A journalism student at the University of Texas, interviewed on Sunday on the CBS program 60 Minutes, irked me. The topic was The List, websites naming profs at U.S. universities who have been accused of letting their left-wing or anti-Israel bias pollute the pure academic air of their classrooms. The student said, roughly: I don’t believe there is any such thing as objectivity, everyone has biases and what’s important is to just be honest and open about them.

She said it lightly, tossed it off, as if it was the kind of thing you know will be accepted in class or on an exam. It irked me, since I’m sure I’ve said similar words often over the years. Hearing it played back as a cliché made me realize I don’t even know what it means.

In fact, I would argue that no journalist can deny the possibility of objective journalism, any more than a philosopher can deny the existence of free will. By taking a determinist position, a philosopher has instantly undermined his or her own argument for determinism, since it must itself have been determined, in which case it cannot claim to be true, merely determined, etc. So you can’t be a philosophical determinist — and you can’t be an unobjective reporter.

Why would you take an assignment and go out on a story if you thought it was un-doable? You may have biases, but you either think of them as objectively true and not mere biases — or else you believe you can render the story anyway, even if a struggle with your bias is required. At the least, each journalist must believe in the possibility.

Let me take a strange case to try and prove this: the suppression in 2001 by the National Post of a report by its own reporter that Brian Mulroney, after leaving office as prime minister, took a large retainer from lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, to advise on a new pasta business and make some international introductions, something that was not fully explained by some previous Mulroney claims. It was fact and the paper killed it over the reporter’s objections. Surely that counts as biased, unobjective journalism.

But consider what the editors of the Post might have thought: Mulroney has already won his Airbus lawsuit against the Chrétien government &#0151 a government whose real purpose was to attack the free-market, neo-con ideas that Mulroney brought in as PM, and which we at the Post support, because they are true and good for Canada. If people read this story, they might decide those policies are dubious, because the Mulroney credibility has come into question. That would be a dangerous and non-objective conclusion, which we, as objective journalists, must not allow to spread.

The above is not intended as satire. Well, not entirely. Little white lies (and omissions) are always told in the name of larger objective truth. It could be national security, it could be true love. Objectivity itself is a notion without a clear definition (find one if you can), and that may be for good reasons. It is more like a fuzzy ideal than a testable phenomenon, and is not something you can either achieve once and for all, through objective journalism, or never achieve. It is a possibility you aim at, approach, without ever being able to reach. Take another example.

At the recent Miami summit on the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, which featured police-protester clashes, journalists were “embedded,” for the first time, on the police side. They could sense how cops felt, strategized and reacted to taunts etc. Critics said that led to a lack of objectivity. Papers like the Miami Herald said it only went along because it had also placed staff among protesters, negotiators etc., thus widening the range of coverage. That sounds like a good argument, as if approaching the ideal of greater objectivity through increased POVs.

But it is only persuasive if you ignore something else: the degree to which U.S. society is already in almost every way deeply embedded in its police forces. Think of the endless cop shows and reruns, drama and reality, crime stories and stats. The cop standpoint outweighs almost any other, except maybe that of celebrities, in U.S. culture.

Embedding at the FTAA just adds another layer to the overload. So you don’t get greater objectivity just by adding stuff; you have to watch the balance and you won’t ever get it exactly right. The context keeps expanding, and you have to try to sort out its meaning.Objectivity is basically a theological notion. Only God, who doesn’t exist (I speak subjectively), is far enough from the object in question, i.e. the world, to see it objectively. The rest of us are embedded, we’re human, we always only get a partial view. The standard debate on journalistic objectivity tends to miss that, by assuming the dilemma is simply that we all have biases and prejudices. We can try to shed them, if we believe in objectivity, or embrace them, if we don’t. Maybe that’s why I’ve always found the discussion a little beside the point.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.