The end of the road

Objectivity is a big word. For starters, it has five syllables and 11 letters and people stumble when they pronounce it. But the real kicker is that no one has any idea what it means. It must mean something, or at least everyone seems to agree that it does. But no two people think it means the same thing. Which means that most everybody is confused. As far as I'm concerned, no good journalist should go anywhere near a word that confuses so many people. Journalism and objectivity should stay the hell away from each other. And for the most part, they do. Newspapers have hewed close to the time-honored principle best articulated by an ornery, utterly subjective editor many years ago: "You don't have the right to compel me to print your views. Go buy your own press." Throughout American history, groups of like-minded citizens have done just that. Time was, most major cities had at least one German-language newspaper; now, most have at least one printed in Spanish. Tories, abolitionists, suffragettes and trade unionists have all run papers at various points in the nation's history. So have gays and lesbians, African Americans and white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. No two of these groups -- nor the newspapers that served them -- saw the news in quite the same way. Newspapers that survive the special interest group they were created to serve do so by changing with the times. The Boston Globe served the city's Irish population at the turn of the last century and the Yuppie population at the turn of this century; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is the New South child of a merger between the old Democratic and Republican papers. Even The New York Times' famous motto, "All The News That's Fit to Print," is just an old centrist pledge to stay out of the pocket of the Democratic Party, a goal it more or less retains to this day. A paper's perspective manifests itself in its selection and prioritization of stories, and in the contents of the stories themselves. Subjective selection is a necessity, a creature of limited space and relevance. The justification for subjective story-telling, however, may seem a shade less obvious. So here it is: If an objective story introduced itself ("Hi, I'm objectivity personified"), I almost certainly wouldn't like it. And neither would you. Subjectivity is the string that runs through stories. It lends disparate facts a unified purpose and ensures that new topics can be understood in the way we understand everything else: by comparison with the known. Subjectivity is the lens through which we make the unfamiliar intelligible, place the random in context and aggregate a body of knowledge rather than collecting a series of discontinuous facts. Candidates for internships at Newsday, Long Island's dominant paper, must write a story based on a list of 20 bullet-pointed facts and quotes. Success is impossible without concluding that you are making subjective choices about which facts to use and how to use them. There is no way to pass the test without making the choices that the editors of Newsday think their readers desire. If they make the wrong choices, readers will stop reading, advertisers will take their money elsewhere, and Newsday will no longer have the money to play the journalism game. The same is true for The Daily Pennsylvanian, broadly speaking. We are helped by the fact that our staff is a constantly changing reflection of a constantly changing student body. We are hurt by the fact that we are young, and not long for our jobs. We are independent so that we can tell you what you need to know, and student-run so that we can tell you what you want to know. And in the end, you determine our success and failure through your daily decision to pick up the paper or to pass it by. Beyond your wants and needs, our gold standard is fairness: Have we, burdened and advantaged by our own subjectivity, given all sides a chance to explain themselves? Have we given you, the reader, the chance to make up your own mind? Have we ever let our opinions color the very facts as we tell them? By my lights, we've been on the right side of these questions more often than not over the past year. And so I end my year atop the masthead with a smile on my face. Thanks for reading.

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