There are many kinds of bias, the anthromorphic bias for instance
where God is a bearded man in the sky, and aliens, although significantly diferent from us in appearance we can still discern that they are human in their attributes,ie head, eyes, ears etc. Thank you Hollywood and Stephen Speilberg et al
When we make our views known on politics, moral issues etc, of course we feel we are being objective, free of bias, otherwise we would not be making our views known, would we?
But is this bias free, holy grail of objectivity that we assume to have is no more than a pretence that I (I don't know about you) am unaware of.
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On a personal level, I get heated about some issue and I forcefully offer my view believing I am giving my audience straight facts, unvarnished by ideology or agenda. Indeed so uncontaminated is my opinion of any bias that I believe I am as the philosopher Thomas Nagel has it, giving you a
'View from Nowhere'.
My view from nowhere type opinion is not tainted by any
polarized extreme. And because of this I may claim to a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions. The media commentariat have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.
Leaving aside whether the View from Nowhere is even a desirable mindset, the reality is that virtually none of us attain the holy grail of objectivity. Instead we are awash in countless highly ideological assumptions that are anything but objective.
These assumptions I/we have are almost always unacknowledged as such and are usually unexamined, and in more cases than not I am not even consciously aware that I have embraced them. But embraced them I have, with unquestioning vigor, and this renders my Weltanschauung (my worldview) every bit as subjective and ideological as those opinionists; those 'lefty' partisans I scorn.
My and perhaps your thinking may be shaped by unexamined, unacknowledged assumptions, which are more biased than those who have consciously examined and knowingly embraced their assumptions, because the refusal or inability to recognize one's own assumptions creates the self-delusion of unbiased objectivity, placing those assumptions beyond the realm of what can be challenged and thus leading one to lay claim to an unearned authority steeped in nonexistent neutrality
So do I have
highly questionable assumptions and orthodoxies on the most critical issues. Eh...mea culpa. Yes. My ideology is hardcore.
When I was on the left and now that I have volte faced to be on the right, they are just as bunker like.
So what do I about this bias. Well, it is not easy to disengage because bias is cemented in one at every turn.
Take the recent VP debate between Biden and Ryan.
The subject of Iran is brought up by the highly praised interlocutor,
journalist Martha Raddatz.
What is not aired by Raddatz is that the US has always required a scary foreign enemy.
In the Cold War it was the paranoid assumption of 'Reds under the beds'. These bloody Communists are everywhere etc.
Indeed, one of the most strictly enforced taboos in establishment journalism is the prohibition on aggressively challenging those views that are shared by the two parties. "Might I suggest to you both that the US has always required a scary foreign enemy?"
You wont hear such questions for to
assert such a thing from the interlocutor would be to
makes one appear fringe, unserious and radical: the opposite of solemn objectivity - which Martha Raddatz was endeavouring to present.
Instead she said "Can the two of you be absolutely clear and specific to the American people how effective would a military strike be?"
Talk about stoking it up.
Raddatz did not ask and never would. Even after both candidates re-affirmed their commitment to attacking Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon. "Yes, it could prove catastrophic, if we didn't do it with precision", there were no questions about whether the US would have the legal or moral right to launch an aggressive attack on Iran. That the US has the right to attack any country it wants is one of those unexamined assumptions in Washington discourse, probably the supreme orthodoxy of the nation's "foreign policy.
Worse, even after Biden boasted about the destruction of the Iranian economy from US sanctions – "the ayatollah sees his economy being crippled. … He sees the currency going into the tank. He sees the economy going into freefall" – there was no discussion about the severe suffering imposed on Iranian civilians by the US, whether the US wants to repeat the mass death and starvation it brought to millions of Iraqis for a full decade, or what the consequences of doing that will be.
In sum, all of Martha Raddatz's questions were squarely within the extremely narrow – and highly ideological – DC consensus about US foreign policy generally and Iran specifically: namely, Iran is a national security threat to the US; it is trying to obtain nuclear weapons; the US must stop them; the US has the unchallenged right to suffocate Iranian civilians and attack militarily. As usual, the only question worth debating is whether a military attack on Iran now would be strategically wise, whether it would advance US interests.
Yet Martha Raddatz is universally acclaimed for being 'objective'.
That is what this faux journalistic neutrality, whether by design or otherwise, always achieves. It glorifies highly ideological claims that benefit a narrow elite class (the one that happens to own the largest media outlets which employ these journalists) by allowing that ideology to masquerade as journalistic fact.
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These establishment journalists are creatures of the Washinton DC and corporate culture in which they spend their careers, and thus absorb and then regurgitate all of the assumptions of that culture. That may be inevitable, but having everyone indulge
the ludicrous fantasy that they are "objective" and
"neutral"
So we go away form this debate Biden/Ryan,with our (false) assumptions confirmed and our bias reinforced.
Soure: the excellent article by Glenn Greenwald
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/12/raddatz-debate-objectivity
the faux objectivity of journalists.
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