Yeah, and pixies should dust all your flowers and carry off the bad bugs, but that's also a fantasy.
Really, Tom. If Bill O'Reilly wasn't fired for lack of objectivity, then why should Olbermann be fired? The myth of objectivity has been pretty well shattered over the last twenty years, and while there hasn't been much in the way of objective, mainstream-published discussion of this (for obvious reasons) most thinking people have long since realized that we failed to maintain the Ideals of the Fourth Estate. Being objective is astonishingly difficult and pragmatically every government knows and encourages that difficulty because it operates against the maintenance of control. Further, the objectivity of the press is tainted by the necessity for funding the day to day operations of the press.
There are people who are able to set aside their personal beliefs on a daily basis in the framework of a job. Many of them are quite good at it, and they use the cognitive and operational tools of the job to make those decisions. We can find them in the judiciary, especially, as a special requirement of the job, but there are fewer people in the press who do this than there used to be. Olbermann, in recognizing that he has a personal bias, is doing much, much better than (specifically) the person who wrote that article you cited. His awareness of that bias is what allows him to write objectively.
no subject
Really, Tom. If Bill O'Reilly wasn't fired for lack of objectivity, then why should Olbermann be fired? The myth of objectivity has been pretty well shattered over the last twenty years, and while there hasn't been much in the way of objective, mainstream-published discussion of this (for obvious reasons) most thinking people have long since realized that we failed to maintain the Ideals of the Fourth Estate. Being objective is astonishingly difficult and pragmatically every government knows and encourages that difficulty because it operates against the maintenance of control. Further, the objectivity of the press is tainted by the necessity for funding the day to day operations of the press.
There are people who are able to set aside their personal beliefs on a daily basis in the framework of a job. Many of them are quite good at it, and they use the cognitive and operational tools of the job to make those decisions. We can find them in the judiciary, especially, as a special requirement of the job, but there are fewer people in the press who do this than there used to be.
Olbermann, in recognizing that he has a personal bias, is doing much, much better than (specifically) the person who wrote that article you cited. His awareness of that bias is what allows him to write objectively.