I struggled with the idea of impartiality or in the US, it's more commonly referred to as be objective early on because that's kind of the zeitgeist that we're all raised in. I really struggle with it even well into my Iraq reporting and fortunately fairly early on in that reporting, I actually got to have dinner with both Howard Zen and Nonschonski together and asked them about this. Well, here's where that myth of objectivity came from and he walked me through starting how in the early 20th century in the United States, any given city would have multiple papers. And so anyone who read any of those new, you're getting a very, very specific
“How long do we keep pretending that capitalism works? How long are we going to keep pretending that there is such a thing as objectivity? How long are we going to keep pretending that we're not in a runaway climate crisis? Systems are literally collapsing – the UK is in massive crisis, the United States is in massive crisis. These countries are seen as the leaders of the western world in a lot of ways and the reality is neither country is even a democracy anymore. We're a corporatocracy at best.
“What happens in countries where there's not legitimate journalism in the mainstream is you end up with a society that's overwhelmed with information. In the United States, huge swaths of the country can't even tell truth from fiction, which is something that Hannah Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism warned: the best subject for totalitarian rule is not someone with a certain political bias, but someone who literally just can't tell truth from fiction anymore.”
Dahr Jamail is an award-winning journalist and author, who was one of the few independent journalists to report extensively from the ground during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Dahr later became a climate reporter, tracking climate disruption around the world and collating his knowledge in the wonderful book, The End of Ice.
Dahr joined me to discuss what’s going wrong with journalism and how to create a journalism which can respond to the climate crisis. We discuss information pollution in the mainstream media, the fallacy of objectivity, the corruption of profit-maximising goals, self-selecting biases, and how the abject failures of the mainstream media have disempowered, disengaged and confused populaces around the world—making them ripe for manipulation by populists.
Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it.
© Rachel Donald
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