Just throwing it out there, but I remember reading in Tuchman’s The Proud Tower about how in Paris in the 1890s, at the time of the Dreyfus affair, there were hundreds of newspapers, newsletters, magazines, periodical pamphlets, etc. and none of them professed objectivity, so everyone read a few of them, and while the reader might have tended to select sources according to their own biases, at least those biases were explicit and the reader wasn’t subject to bland, utterly decontextualized facts with no usefulness.
The thing about reporting that Mitt Romney said that Obama “apologizes for America” without really going over if it’s true, is that it may be news, but it’s completely non-actionable. Merely repeating Mitt’s bald claim is useless to a reader, objectively. What are they supposed to do with this information?
