It's Probably Because You Suck

This ludicrous notion that any media outlet is "objective" (whatever that's supposed to mean in practice) could not be more dangerous. Equally wrong-headed is the notion of providing "balance" by showing "both" opposing views, as if any topic could be restricted to just two. It's all just part of an information system designed to keep people from thinking at all costs. Largely this is unconscious on the part of the people involved in the system, but that changes nothing.

Of course, the public bear their share of the blame. Believing that the news is objective and that giving two officially sanctioned viewpoints is balance absolves you from the responsibility of educating yourself. It's laziness and cowardice, plain and simple.

Usually, the opposing views are selected to both fit into a larger bias, creating an illusion of debate that actually narrows the range of opinion. A particularly stark example of this was a news show I watched many years ago about the Vietnam war, that examined the question of whether the US army eventually pulling out of the country was a betrayal of the Vietnamese people, or an inevitable misfortune that could not have been avoided. Somehow the idea that the entire military action from start to finish was a huge crime against humanity was never part of the debate. In some form or another these kinds of false polarities exist in all media.

What information media requires isn't "balance" or "objectivity" but diversity. We need outlets that wear their biases proudly on their sleeve so we can all see plainly just how their views are slanted, and we need a lot of these kinds of outlets, so that many different biased views are available to the public. Of course, this requires said public to do a lot of heavy lifting, sifting through reams of information and constructing critical analyses out of it all. Nobody wants that. They just want someone to tell them, in plain english, exactly what's "really going on". The idea that you could possibly get this from anyone is a level of self-delusion that rivals clinging to the myth of Santa Clause, but people refuse to give it up, and more than anything else, this is destroying society.

Our addiction to the illusion of objectivity allows these huge media conglomerations to seem perfectly rational. After all, if the news is "objective" and gives us "both sides of the story", then why should it matter that one company owns all the newspapers in the country? If you are taken in by these notions, then ownership is irrelevent. Of course, back in the real world, it is extremely relevent who owns the papers you read. Every single word will be steeped, both consciously and unconsciously, in the biases of those owners, biases that the audience is willfully ignorant of, desperate to preserve the myth of objectivity, so they don't have to figure things out for themselves.

Diversity and conflict are the fundamental elements of nature, and likewise, of both democracy and education. No system can remain healthy without them. It's messy, but it's all that works. Uniformity always creates weakness, instability, and eventually, destruction.