Fake Objectivity

[Riverwolf]

Objectivity, like most words, has more than one meaning. Allow me to suggest that you've latched onto the wrong meaning here and have run with it. That's to say, your remarks are largely irrelevant to the OP.

Perhaps. But I'm not aware of any other meaning that has real-world relevance or application.

 

[Mister Emu]

Of course they should take a side: they should be on the side of the truth.

It's one thing if they're reporting on a values issue where different people can legitimately have different points of view, but on factual matters, if one side is in accordance with the facts and the other isn't, there's no obligation to give the other side air time.

The interpretation of facts isn't always so straight forward.

, there's no obligation to even acknowledge a meritless dissenting view.

Why not let the people decide for themselves whether a dissenting view is without merit? Especially if there are qualified members of the field who are dissenting?

 

[Tomorrows_Child]

I notice these days that it's quite popular to indulge oneself in the intellectually dishonest practice of faking objectivity. The media seems to be especially addicted to faking objectivity.

That is, the truth might be clearly on the side on x, but the media will go out of its way to give equal time to not-x on the grounds that doing so is being objective.

Balderdash! Being objective has nothing necessarily to do with merely giving equal time to two opposing points of view. Being objective -- truly objective -- demands that you side with the truth. You simply cannot be objective while pretending that a falsehood has equal weight as a truth.

But what do you think?

Agreed entirely.

Your post should pretty much end the thread in my opinion. Nothing more to be said.

True objectivity, as you mention, is about being truly honest.

 

[FlyingTeaPot]

Let's consider this. The score at a basketball game is 97-3. The media today would report the game as "Team A says they won, and Team B says they won." , in the name of being objective. They never bothered to check the score because that would involve research.

 

[Thief]

I don't believe it's even possible to be truly objective.

The standard dichotomy is subjective vs. objective. Being subjective is looking at an "object" from one's own (the "subject's") perspective, while being objective is looking at the same object from its perspective, independent of one's own. However, I believe that this is impossible. We can only regard things from our own perspective. Consider, how would a human objectively know the perspective of a rock? Now, that is an extreme example, but I do believe it still holds even on the level of a human trying to objectively consider the perspective of a chimpanzee.

So, I basically regard any person's claim to being "objective" as "fake."

Now, that said, the reason it's impossible is because we all have biases, whether individual or communal. While it is impossible to remove all of those biases, we can reduce them. An individual can never be objective, or even get close, but a community can get close. Collectively taken, our individual biases can be taken into account and removed from consideration when regarding something, thus reducing subjectivity. We all still have community biases, so we can never fully reach objectivity, but we can get close enough that arguing whether it's "objectively true" that Earth orbits Sun, for example, is semantic nitpicking.

I think I get the idea you started with....
we as individuals cannot ever shift perspective ...100%

but then leaning to a group discussion as a better perspective?
for centuries we humans thought our world was all 'centered'

and I do attempt to see the other guys 'perspective'
but it seems I can make consideration deeper than most
especially of them leaning on dogma for support