Penelope Trunk is right, (though I'm not sure that she understands all the implications of her position):

Here's my advice: If you do an interview with a journalist, don't expect the journalist to be there to tell your story. The journalist gets paid to tell her own stories which you might or might not be a part of. And journalists, don't be so arrogant to think you are not "one of those" who misquotes everyone. Because that is to say that your story is the right story. But it's not. We each have a story. And whether or not someone actually said what you said they said, they will probably still feel misquoted.

In other words, "objective journalism" is a myth (something I've been pointing out for a long time):

The first [delusion] is common to journalism school graduates (or even dropouts), because it's part of the modern creed--that there is some achievable perfection called "objective factual reporting."

The second, which is not only a delusion, but a conceit, is that his employer's paper not only attempts to achieve that platonic ideal, but actually succeeds.

Here's a reality check. Stories are (at least for now) reported by humans, with human emotions, and human points of view. They are inevitably viewed through the prism of the reporter, and as they become ink and pixels, are passed through the sieve of his experience and prejudices. About any event, there is an infinitude of information that could be provided, but there isn't ink and newsprint enough, nor bandwidth, nor time in the day for the reporter to write it, and the reader to read it.

So a story has to be reduced to what the reporter considers to be its essential elements. Like the old joke about the sculptor, he takes the body of available facts, and cuts away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. But that's the key; the sculptor is carving an elephant--a decision usually made before chisel is taken in hand. It may be that the rock from which he's knocking off the non-pachydermic chips wasn't simply a rectangular block--it perhaps naturally started out with a resemblance to an elephant, but that doesn't mean that he couldn't have hacked out a hippo instead.

So it is with a news story. The reporter has to start with some notion of what the story is. And as soon as that decision is made, the bias has begun, and continues. He has to decide which facts are facts, and which are conjecture. He has to decide which of those facts and conjectures should be included, and which left out. He has to decide which words to use--whether the protagonist is, for example, a "terrorist" or a "freedom fighter." Each of those decisions, word by word, preconception by preconception, eventually determines whether the reporter creates an elephant, or a hippo, or a redwood tree.

And after that, if he works for a "serious newspaper," he has to submit it to an editor, who will either agree that the reporter has created an elephant, or he might point out that he left out some critical item (e.g., a trunk) or included one that seems out of place (e.g., webbed bird claws for feet).

Once past this serious process, the story is complete. And in the mind of Mr. Rutten, "accurate the first time," though a different reporter at a different "serious newspaper," working with exactly the same body of facts (but a different background, sensibility, and bias) might write, and his editor edit, a completely different "accurate" story in which, lo and behold, it turns that it was a hippo after all, or perhaps...a platypus.

As I've also noted many times, what rankles so much about media bias is not so much the bias itself, but the media's willful blindness to it, and sanctimonious attitude.

And I don't agree with her that "it doesn't matter," and that when literally misquoted, or quoted out of context, we should simply "get over it." She's right that we shouldn't expect any better, but we should still point it out when it happens, early and often, and that's what the blogosphere, and free speech in general, is all about. Paid reporters have no special First Amendment privileges. Continually pointing out their falsities and frailties, and agendas, is the only way for everyone to get the full story.

From her first paragraph,

As a journalist I hear all the time from people in business that they are misquoted. And you know what? People need to get over that...

Something tells me that Murrow didn't do this or think this way. I've read enough about the mid 20th century journalists to know they had some love for being factual. How arrogant is Ms Trunk to tell anyone she misquotes that her "muddling" of their words is the best way to report their story.

Scary stuff.

Two points.

You shouldn't blow off attempting objectivity because it theoretically isn't possible. This is like saying it's no use measuring the wood going into a house build because a tape can only measure to an eight of an inch.

What this really points out is that the press is utterly on another planet from a large fraction of the public. In a less bi-stable society small inaccuracies and biases wouldn't make any difference, but in the context of culture which had been split for the last 40 years it becomes a first order effect.

One could make the same argument that we shouldn't bitch because politicians use earmarks to reward their supporters, or that we shouldn't expect justice for minorities because the system is biased against them.

The bias has always been there; humans are not infallible. But I've always held that the institution of journalism should make a good-faith effort not to let your stories reflect it. Hence, the need -- nay, requirement -- to get opposing viewpoints in. The mandate to check your facts, and double-check them, and to stick to the facts and not let it slip into commentary.

That's been swept away for a long while, and for Ms. Trunk -- columnist and former beach vollyball player (check her bio) -- to say so without shame is indicative of the state of journalism today.

Competition is good, not because it will change the behavior of biased journos -- many of these people have been trained in the j-school tradition of narrative and agenda over truth and are lost causes -- but because there are now plenty of high-quality alternatives to the MSM.

Rand you just don't get it. ALL media is bias. When you choose what you will and what you will not report, you are making an ideological choice.

Rand you just don't get it. ALL media is bias. When you choose what you will and what you will not report, you are making an ideological choice.

What do you mean, I "just don't get it." Didn't you read what I wrote? I agree.

Rand you just don't get it. ALL media is bias. When you choose what you will and what you will not report, you are making an ideological choice.

Adrastreia, I don't think this was the point of Penelope Trunk's article. Trunk seems to claim that bias, no matter how substantial or how detached from reality, isn't a problem. The journalist is "telling a story". I suppose then that they can slant it as much as they, their employers, and their advertisers want to. Perhaps, employ the other usual forms of deception as well, as long as they don't "lie".

Her examples aren't helpful either. Hiding your employment history isn't ethical, but at least the adversarial nature of job hunter and employer is understand. How does that translate to journalist and reader? Why are they in an adversarial relationship? And marry the person that portrays you as a crazy person in an amateur movie? The connections to journalism bias are obvious.

Even in the limited context of quotes, I think one can slant another's words hideous merely through selective quoting or interpreting. As Cardinal Richelieu supposedly said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

As a journalist I hear all the time from people in business that they are misquoted. And you know what? People need to get over that...

Which begs the question, why should anyone ever bother to talk to a reporter at all? This is the embodiment of "fake but accurate" news reporting. It doesn't matter what the subject of the interview said, it's what the reporter wants to say that matters. Why would anyone in their right mind consent to an interview if "get over that" is the ground rule?

That's right. And nowadays you can blog your own story as a deterrent and remedy to misquotation. So Trunk has it backwards: it's not interviewees who need to get over their concern about having their stories distorted by the press, it's journalists who need to get over their belief that they have a monopoly on the framing of stories.

Objectivity is certainly a worthy (and impossible) goal. Those that think it's possible seem to ignore the fact that even an article that does seem objective is a non-objective choice from among the set of all possible articles which could be written in it's place.

Objective journalism is a "myth"? C'mon. You might as well go whole hog post-modernist and argue that objective anything is a myth. The very same arguments can -- and have -- been made about science and engineering, that any measurement is made by human beings, with inevitable biases, and framed by theories and preconceptions about what reality is, not to mention the biases introduced by having an emotional investment in one answer versus another, and blah blah blah. Medieval monks routinely argued that much of how the world worked was forever inscrutable to mortal minds, freighted with Adamic infallibility.

But fortunately we technicians generally reject such a pessimistic worldview as (1) excessive and (2) useless, and, blithing ignoring the "insoluble problem" of human bias, go on to discover such counter-intuitive things as Newtonian gravity, relativity, quantum mechanics, semiconductors, and the human genome.

Despite human biases, we can and do approach objectivity in the way we describe natural events. Newton's prestige stifled the development of the wave theory of light for centuries, probably -- but not forever. Millikan's prestige delayed the correct measurement of the charge on the electron by a decade, probably -- but not forever. Veneration of Aristotle slowed science down considerably -- but did not stop it entirely.

I see no reason why the same can't be true of the way in which we describe the actions of human beings halfway around the planet. The journalist may not be able to be perfectly objective, but that is no excuse not to try, and get as close as possible, and it is no reason not to have standards of objectivity that grow steadily higher over time, as methods of checking and verifying objectivity improve.

I find this post-modernist "Oh we can never know the truth, so let's just not even try..." despair to be a cop-out by lazy journalists, or ideological camouflage by those who don't even want to be objective. Either way, it's pathetic, the sign of a arthritic soul.