Objectivity and factuality in news are unattainable ideals, not achievements.

Evidence

We do not live in a natural world: things like newspapers, news, and opinions do not occur naturally; they are made, as the result of human will, history, social circumstances, institutions, and the conventions of one’s profession. Such aims of the press as objectivity, factuality, realistic coverage, and accuracy are highly relative terms; they express intentions, perhaps, and not realizable goals. They are definitely not to be thought of as occurring as a matter of course, just because we have grown accustomed to thinking of our newspapers as reliable and factual, while those in communist and non-Western countries are considered propagandistic and ideological. The actuality is, as Herbert Gans has shown in his important book Deciding What’s News, that journalists, news agencies, and networks consciously go about deciding what is to be portrayed, how it is to be portrayed, and the like. News, in other words, is less an inert given than the result of a complex process of usually deliberate selection and expression. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 180

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gans’s ‘Deciding What’s News’ and to the ‘both-sides’ critique of U.S. journalism culture.

Related

• News conventions and profit motive reduce complex reality to uniform stories. (similarity 0.80)
• Media coverage replaces lived events, reducing people to walk-on roles. (similarity 0.80)
• Media output is uniform despite the abundance of sources and outlets. (similarity 0.79)