Objectivity, News and Healthcare

After the healthcare summit last week, these were the leading headlines on the three major news websites:

FOX: GOP comes out swinging.
CNN: Spirited but civil debate at healthcare summit.
MSNBC: Tempers flair at Obama's healthcare summit.

Each of those titles is really very different. It isn't even that one is 'liberal' and one 'conservative' necessarily or that two are stark opposites of each other. Each network just reached an entirely different conclusion as to how to summarize the summit in a one line title.

In a way, this isn't all bad, as for all news to report the same thing seriously risks discourse and debate being lost in our culture. Having a culture with a singularity around any field of knowledge is a serious impediment to progress and democracy. However, many people do watch one of those networks (or any news source, for that matter) as objective fact. But asking networks to be 100% objective is probably an impossible task as even TV anchors unconsciously give subtle clues to their own personal feelings in their posture, tone of voice and hand gestures. So the problem is not really the lack of subjectivity, but rather that these networks and news services claim to be objective (Fair & Balanced, anyone?) and therefore many people watch them expecting an objective analysis and don't place what they hear in a larger context.

There is nothing wrong with getting news from any of these sources. However, everything must be placed within the proper context of who is doing the reporting. This is another way that context is incredibly important in our society in terms of understanding information that it is presented with. To hear a soundbite and know whether it came from MSNBC or Fox News helps people understand better what they are hearing.

I can only keep my fingers crossed that one day Fox's 'Fair & Balanced' would change to 'Leading Conservative Provider of News.' Does anyone really believe after looking into the issue that Fox is fair and balanced? I hope not. And admitting a political inclination is not a bad thing at all. It's honest. Internet news sources seem to get quickly pinned as liberal or conservative and thus readers can try to place what they read in the proper political and cultural context, and we need to encourage networks to be honest and help people place what is reported on in a better frame of mind.

Context out of Context

The idea of context is an interesting one, and a topic I've briefly covered in some past posts and columns, but I am beginning to realize that the idea of context is much more fundamental and important that it is gnerally given credit for. 

In Jaron Lanier's book You are not a Gadget, he argues that my generation (Generation Y or the Millennials) and the younger generations are loosing context as part of our experience with culture and media. No longer must you read the entire length of a work to understand it, you can just head over to Wikipedia and look at bits and pieces gathered from various sources (sometimes up to 300-400 or more footnotes on a single Wikipedia page) and loose much of the context and importance that was meant to be conveyed in the original work. Academic works are amalgamated into mediums like Wikipedia, and art, music and video are mashed up into remixed YouTube videos, again with the original context of the work being totally lost when it is viewed in such a tertiary form. In fact, in many cases it's quite possible that tertiary viewer doesn't even know anything about the original creation, or that there really was even an original creation that allowed for the viewing of this work.

I wish I had more of a conclusion to draw, or even more of a direction in which to ask questions, but alas the best I can do right now is bring this issue and promise to revisit the idea of context and what it means that I believe younger generations are beginning, in all aspects of living, to lose context.