On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:37 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan <che...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Palagummi Sainath - 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism > Tomas Friedman - Order of the British Empire > Arundhati Roy - Booker Prize, 1997 > > Please give me some examples of "objective" journalism that you'd like > to see more of, and who in your opinion is a model journalist? > Most good newspapers in the USA and the UK have a clear separation of news and opinion. Friedman is a columnist, Roy writes opinion pieces, and while Sainath has done reporting, most of his work is in the opinion space. So c'mon, not only can you not expect these chaps to be objective (if there is any such thing), I'd argue they shouldn't be: their job is precisely the opposite. They're supposed to look at the world through a particular lens, and since we know what that lens is, it's easy for us to discount it. News reporters, on the other hand, should ideally just report, and you shouldn't get the slightest inkling of a reporter's ideology from their reports. Obviously some bias does creep in the very act of choosing a narrative to construct, but the best reporters in the best papers abroad do a pretty good job of it. As an example, check out Dexter Filkins's incredible war reportage for the NYT, particularly his masterpiece, The Forever War, which won the Pulitzer, I think. You'll see similarly good work from the likes of Rajeev Chandrasekaran, Lawrence Wright and Steve Coll, among reporters who've written on the war on terror, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, among those who've written on the financial crisis. (Sorkin's book, Too Good to Fail, is also a great example of outstanding reportage that is worthy of being called history's first draft -- without a hint of idiology in it.) In India, the lines between news and opinion, alas, are not so strictly maintained. But that said, there are plenty of hardworking journos in our newspapers who report facts faithfully. To generalise because of a few wonky editorialists is not fair. -- Amit Varma http://www.indiauncut.com http://www.twitter.com/amitvarma
