How Do You Decide What to Include in Your Narrative?
‘Objectivity’ and perspective
Journalists often pursue the goal of “objectivity.” Of course, language isn’t neutral, and any human writer or reader inevitably has our own personal perspective. Even deciding which facts to mention requires personal judgment.
“There are many facts, but not all facts are equal,” Brian Klaas wrote in the Washington Post in December 2021. (That’s my subscription’s unpaywalled gift link.)
“There was a tornado in Kentucky last week. There wasn’t a tornado in Minnesota. Only one is worth reporting. Reporters and editors make decisions about which facts to cover — and then it’s up to them to provide the reader with an appropriate sense of scale.”
Ezra Klein wrote in Why We’re Polarized (2020):
“The news is supposed to be a mirror held up to the world, but the world is far too vast to fit in our mirror. The fundamental thing the media does all day, every day, is decide what to cover — decide, that is, what is newsworthy.”
“Neutral,” by the way, may be “boring and visionless,” Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote in The Left Hand of God (2006), which doesn’t benefit media professionals in the long run anyway — it “just loses them an audience.”
