Jay has made his case protesting about he said, she said journalism. I don't disagree that this is bad journalism. But this is a different matter than trying to abstract journalism about facts from journalism about perception. Without a focus on the intuitions and exchanges that structure the things we are covering, what can we really say. Where is the archimedean point of politics coverage?

Well, for starters, I don't think Jay wants journalists to stop talking about perception. He wants them to stop pretending it's all there is, and give up on even trying to figure out if, say, a political candidate is trying to bullshit us or not.

At the end of the day, that's a disservice to our audience. They don't care about how a certain proposed regulation "will be perceived as affecting them," they care about how it will actually affect them. They don't care about a candidate's strategy for winning over a certain demographic, they care about whether they, as a part of that demographic, can count on that candidate.

Secondly, we're not talking about the theory-ladenness of perception or other limits to objectivity here. We're talking about not even engaging in a conversation about truth and falsity at all.

Those are great points and I would completely agree with you and Jay to your point above: "to stop pretending it's all there is, and give up on even trying to figure out if, say, a political candidate is trying to bullshit us or not." But i think it's a strawman. I mean, who is pretending there is all that there is. Which credible news publication has stopped looking for facts?

Secondly, I believe that Jay is truly arguing for some sideways view onto the facts of politics. He is yearning for some truth above the political circus. But politics is mutually sense reciprocal with the "circus" whereby it takes the form of all the not-neat facts of performance and double-talk. It's blurrly nostalgia to yearn for more.

blurry*

You call it nostalgia to yearn for more, I call it defeatism to not ask for more. Nowhere in the world is politics and the reporting about it so utterly weird and twisted as it is in the US. It doesn't have to be that way. The circus is a part of politics, but that doesn't mean the media should amplify it and feed it. Yet we do.

Well, I think you are starting to get to the real point, the point that Jay is blowing past with his talk about facts and reality. It's not a question of journalism seeking a "realer" political reality, it's a question of quality.

Jay's point should have just been, "We aren't doing a very rigorous job covering the game. We are getting lost in the keeping score, the boomshakalaka, the breakingest race." It's not that we are covering politics like sport that's woeful, it's that we are being bad sports reporters.

Shorter: I think you are right that we should yearn for more. But this has nothing to do with "defending reality" or separating a journalism of facts from a journalism about perception. The two are, necessarily, one.

Let's consider a concrete example. Jay is explicitly against (and rightly so) journalism like the following: "Romney says Obama kills cats. Obama says Romney kills cats. Sure is a lot of talk about cat-killing. But who has come up with the best cat-killing imagery? Does Romney even know what a drowned cat looks like?" There would be no mention of whether or not either Romney or Obama ever killed a cat.

But compare the piece Jay cites. Neither "It worked" nor "You didn't build that" are terribly rooted in verifiable facts. A journalist would have to untangled what it means to have "worked" or to have "built something". Then she would have to struggle to dredge up numbers and figures to support whatever weak fact claim she could construct?

Hm, that example might not be very apropos, because on this issue everybody agrees that Romney's camp chose to willfully misinterpret Obama's words for political gain. It would've been very easy for a newspaper to say "not cool, Romney." No untangling necessary.

Of course, because we've made a habit out of being neutral (rather than impartial) observers, it would be suspicious if we routinely started calling out lies and pandering, which just emphasizes the mess we've gotten ourselves in.

But, yes, we're getting at the core of the issue now, and I don't disagree with anything you say.

I do think it's misguided to read Jay's frustration as a philosophical hankering for Cartesian foundationalism or something of the sort. It's really just an everyday rough-and-ready distinction between fact and fiction. I don't think infusing epistemology into this question is useful. That's what I was trying to say in 140 characters on Twitter :-)

But that's not right. It's not fact-vs-fiction is the old fact-value dichotomy. I thought we were done with that insidious distinction. But that's the problem with the fact-value dichotomy: it wraps itself up as innocuous. But it allows skilled rhetors to shim in bad points. Here, we have Jay trying to argue that journalism that is just low quality is somehow not serving facts because it's about perception. If we want better journalism we need to have a rigorous understanding of its domain and that includes issues of language.

The field of journalistic theory is withered and free of rigor because everyone always appeals to perennial philosophy. I'm tired of that appeal.

*no*.
journalism can NOT be about facts sans subjectivity. there is a fundamental distinction between 'reporting' and 'journalism'.

i've drafted a piece explaining the same in detail (see link) the pass-key to access the document is: 183.
[ docs.google.com ]

(i'm sorry for the password - i'd written it as part of a book i'm working on, so am a bit reserved - this thread however, was enticing and i wanted to share my views with you nonethess. the middle-path, then, was to share it for a few days + apply a password.)

Very interesting piece. A few questions:

In reference to Jay's piece, I believe he would say that "reporting" on this misrepresentations of your speakers, your subjects is the problem. He would say: don't report on their untruths, expose them journalistically as untruths. Do you agree with that sentiment?

Also, you mention "reporting things as they occur" as opposed to how someone perceives them. But isn't perception, with all its subjective baggage and grounds, a precondition for reporting? That is to say, if subjectivity is not only inextricable from report but essential to its genesis, shouldn't we do a bit of apperception; highlight the subject's relation to the report like scientists note the relation of the experiment to the result?

I think the discussion also has to take into account media ownership. No journalist is going to say they deliberately change a report to ensure it marries with an outlets owners political leanings. Its more subtle than that. Look what's happened here in the UK with News International. They became so close to the last government that a culture developed that made it difficult to keep them in check.

It's this unseen influence that cant 'change facts' but it can interpret and influence perception and reporting. The media is our filter and we look to it for analysis. Its human nature that whoever reports brings their own perception to the table, and in some cases an editorial agenda will influence that perception.

note 1 of 3: on a reporter.
a reporter states "2 nuclear bombs were air-dropped on japan by usa in august 1945. 16 million dead. japan releases a statement condemning the act and unilaterally surrenders arms. the world remains silent." such a statement (report) is what goes down in the annals of history, and a future civilisation can refer to all such reports and understand history.

note 2 of 3: on a journalist.
a journalist, who certainly is expected to provide citations and references et al., is an equally necessary being.
a journalist in usa would state "2 nuclear bombs were gallantly air-dropped by our pilots on the enemy's landmass in august 1945. 16 million were killed, and japan was destroyed into submission. all hail freedom!"
a journalist in japan would state "2 horrific bombs have left us without millions and millions of our brothers and sisters, and we are stunned by this ghastliness. japan does not believe that usa values life - let alone freedom of life - and we are left with no will to fight against such hatred."

note 3 of 3: on accountability.
a journalist must not misconstrue facts. only (only!) 200,000 were killed in those attacks.

if a politician had said "i do not enter an african-american's home if he is someone who had threatened me in the past", a journalist (even if he writes for a body that opposes that politician) MUST not publish something like, "he insulted african-americans and refused to attend their homes. this certainly shows that he is a racist curmudgeon."

*

i am not a trained journalist/reporter. nor do i have any idea about american olitics. and i'm afraid, @erikhinton, that your query was a little difficult for me to understand. but i will try and read Jay's piece again, try and get my head around it, and respond suitably.

replying to erik's questions:

1/ yes, i would agree. but that is in "an ideal case". sadly however: corporate hegemony and political might are bedfellows, and journalism is most-often their little toddler tethered to the bed, and has little independence. it is always nice, though, to find good journalism. in india, "the hoot" comes to mind, but well, such platforms of journalism are condemned to remain unpopular (or as jay would put it: "unsavvy").

2/ no, subjectivity is not a precondition for reporting. the three "notes" (above) are an attempt to explain that. subjectivity, however, does *naturally* creep in, and that is what makes reporting a challenging profession [just as how expressing beautifully is the tough bit in journalism].

But how can there be perception without subjectivity? Even in your example of a reporter above, the words used are conditioned by the experience of the reporter. I don't think subjectivity is bad, it seems to be what allows for language and perception. Computers and machines aren't subjective and, coincidentally, they can't perceive, just record. They can't talk, just pass bits around.

Also, that example of a US journalist is wildly inaccurate. I've never seen such a jingoism or spectacle from a real journalist.

you raise a fantastic point.

yes, insofar as it is a person that reports, some subjectivity shall creep in (based on: language, accepted morals of the time etc). likewise, if you use a normal camera to report on a scene, it will only capture the colours that it is caliberated for. an infra-red camera, by virtue of what it is, will only capture (and thereafter: deliver) a infra-reddish image and never speak of the ultra-violet rays.

i wanted to put forth the distinction between pure reporting and pure (subjective) journalism, hence requested participation. for most other points, i will confess ineptness. i'm afraid i am not intimate with nuances of the field.

ps. apologies for the extreme example. it was rash but altogether fictitious.

There's a famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche that says: "There are no facts, only interpretations". The quote is actually incomplete, as Nietzsche promptly added: "And this is an interpretation too". It may be subtle, but this is crucial to me. The only problem with subjectivity and interpretation is the misconception that there is such a thing as objective reality. Interpretation is a term derived from the composition of two latin words: INTER (=between) and PRET (from greek "phràt-tein" = to show, manifest). Interpretation is always a transaction, therefore it would be naive to think that that (subjective) interests (from latin INTER+ESSE = between us) could be left out of the equation.

If it's true that a "normal camera" only captures reality, it's arguable that it will capture ONE reality, not THE reality, as it is supposed to work under specific, expected (from us, who have built it) operative parameters and constraints. Still, the image will inevitably be filtered, interpreted from a certain subject, as it certainly can't speak for itself: a signifier is muted without a signified. Remember Jacque Lacan's lesson: "For the signifier is a unique unit of being which, by its very nature, is the symbol of but an absence". If objective reality existed, there would be no way to gain access to it.
Everything we call "reality" is instead the result of a number of intersubjective transactions.

You could argue that journalism can become less perceptive by reducing it to bare numbers "2000 people attended an event" for example. Yet everyone reading the article will have a different feel when reading that number. Journalism itself is about writing words and reporting facts. The problem of perception doesn't lay in the journalism realm, it lays in the people reading the words. Their perception depends on many things like education, where they've grown up, where they live, what other journals they read. In the end you could only slightly reduce the effect of perception on journalism by being less subjective and more objective.

But who provides "bare numbers"? Are they the truth? And who is able to verify them, to make them true?
Bare numbers are true to us if we are co-agreeing on their validity, and isn't it a matter of interpretation?
Don't forget that the journalist himself is imbued with cultural, historical preconceptions, so the "problem" is actually widespread, on both sides.
If journalism was simply reporting of some undeniable objective reality, I wouldn't see the point in being a journalist. Who would need journalism if reality was such an obvious thing?
Feel free to "object" to my point! ;)

Journalism can't omit perception. Journalism is not about giving facts, it is about deciding which facts are important to your audience.

Even if someone wrote a piece that tries to be 100% impartial, it will be influenced by:

a) The order in which the information in the piece is presented (not all facts can be presented with an equal relevance level).
b) The medium.

en.wikipedia.org