Objectivity

I keep seeing things about journalistic integrity or objective truth or truth in history, and I think they're all relatively right. I can say that because it's a joke about objective truth. Get it?

It seems to me that while there might be an objective truth out there somewhere, at least as a Platonic ideal, no one will ever experience that truth the same way. That's a fancy way of saying that there is no such truth, I realize, but I think the ideal can be useful. Striving to get as close to the objective truth as is humanly possible (and notice I say humanly possible, because whether you like it or not, that's what it is) can be a powerful motivation. It can keep us honest, make us more investigative, all that truck.

However, even if we experience that pure objective truth (not that I'm saying we would, since I highly doubt it), we'll never be able to write about it objectively. News or history, the facts aren't even objective. So we're faced with several options.

The one most people seem to choose is to try as hard as they can to achieve perfection and then assume that perfection has been, for all intents and purposes, achieved. Sometimes an author shows the manuscript around to try to remove all the controversy. Sometimes we try to argue both sides of the story, or at least present them. We feel guilty that we might be biased, so we try to remove the bias.

It's an impossible task, I'm afraid. The mere statement of a fact is biased against not stating the fact. I know that sounds trite, but all statements are biased in some way. We can't objectify something by removing bias; it can't be done.

Other people embrace biases without bias, as it were. Sometimes this is appropriate, as in a political manifesto. But in journalism or history, pandering to your subjectivity is not a recipe for success. How many people take Nazi histories seriously, for instance? For that matter, how many people take political manifestos seriously as historical fact? Wait, don't answer that, it's too depressing to think about how many people probably do.

The only way, to my mind, to mitigate bias and pursue objectivity is to acknowledge the problem. Instead of attempting to remove any biased statements, an author should simply own up to his or her biases. Knowledge of the author's views (remember my little piece on Op-Ed) enables us to read what must undoubtedly be at least slightly biased material through the lens of knowing what biases informed the work.

Obviously it doesn't make sense to read a biography of an author before reading the author's own biography of someone else. For that matter, you'd have to read the biography of the person who wrote that biography, and so on and so on. So bias must be acknowledged where it would have the most affect. For instance, if an historian writes a book about 17th Century Europe, it probably isn't important to know that historian's opinion of computer operating systems, or what car that historian drives. Then again, it might be very important, so there are no hard and fast rules of disclosure here, I'm afraid.

Unfortunately, the burden of revealing the author's bias most often falls on the reader. The lesson here perhaps is that objectivity, however well-intentioned, cannot be trusted completely. If a point of view seems to be leaning in some direction, find out why. Do a little research into historians beyond reading the book jacket and learning what other books they've published and what degrees they hold. No matter how hard they try, they're not completely objective.

In the spirit of disclosure I must point out that I have read a few books about Post-Modernism, and while I'm not sure where I stand as far as literary criticism is concerned, I think that many of the same ideas can be applied more successfully to reading history and journalism. Since I don't completely understand Post-Modernism, I'm not sure that helps. And my father was killed by a historian/journalist who believed in objective truth.

No, that was a lie. But if it had been true, wouldn't you have seen the previous paragraphs a little differently?