Tag: Journalism

Annals of avoidance

This cover of Time magazine from the 25th anniversary of JFK’s assassination illuminates the peculiar practices of journalists on President Kennedy’s death.

The normal journalistic aspiration is to report news facts on a subject of interest, sift out the less important and lead with the most important, and then put try to put the facts in context.

Of course, there is no such thing as “objectivity.” Journalists bring to bear the usual range of human passions and prejudices to the task. Editors must respond to the publishers who pay everyone’s salary. And news organizations must reach some kind of working relationship with government agencies in order to do their job in reporting on them. But the aspiration to overcome such compromises in service of reporting the news was — is — central to the journalistic enterprise

This Time magazine cover shows a team of highly paid journalism avoiding this aspiration. …

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