WHY JOURNALISTS ARE THROWING SHOES

Among the many crimes of propriety committed by Iraqi television journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi’s, who threw his shoes at President Bush during his surprise visit to Iraq, is al-Zaidi’s lack of journalistic objectivity. His disrespectful act clearly reveals a bias against Bush, which we expect will compromise the objectivity of his journalism.

It seems, however, that al-Zaidi is not alone in the new swarm of journalists who are throwing shoes.
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Aside from the journalists who convert to the blogging world, is a new era of readers who expect notions of objectivity are going to be left behind.

Political blogger Andrew Sullivan in his article “Why I blog” says the blog is the “spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in the immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers…” As more readers shift to niche sources of news and opinion that are tailored to their particular ideologies, it seems like readers are no longer expecting or commending the objective journalist.

The Huffington Post serves as a case in point of a news source that wears its bias on its sleeve. It seeks to provide “transparency, accountability, and community.” Unlike major news sources, however, it does not tout a fair and balanced coverage, but renders its biases explicitly clear, providing readers with the grain of salt they need to read with. Ethan Zuckerman contemplates the tradeoffs with the rise of new media, asking,

Should we expect that readers are aware that media has changed and that we should expect every voice to have strong, visible bias? Or does this point to a need to re-learn how to read both online and offline media to understand that we’ve got far more activist media and far less that’s striving for - real or fake - neutrality?

The democratization of information through new forms of news distribution is creating a readership that no longer believes news to be an objective set of facts handed down by impartial robots. Whether the bias is meticulously veiled with notions of impartiality or is worn as a token of pride in editorial blogs, readers have a new awareness of agendas that need to be carefully picked apart.

~SJP