Blog 5

Blog 5

            Journalistic objectivity is a writer’s ability to assess a subject without biases and not misrepresent a person or scenario with their partial opinions. It is hard to say if a story can truly be written without any biases whatsoever because human beings always have feeling and emotions that make them lean one way or the other. When an author gathers information for a story he or she has to sift through countless interviews and research and what he puts decides to add or no add is a subconscious reflection of his opinion, what he wants the reader to know about the story.  

In Dickens’ article The Great Tasmania’s Cargo, the victims were the soldiers. In Hersey’s Hiroshima the victims were the Japanese. No prior information is given on what sparked these people to fall victim to tragedy. It can be argued that the dropping of the atomic bomb saved lives by ending further war. The blame can be put on Truman and the American’s or put on the Emperor and Japanese military. Although Hiroshima satisfies Hersey’s agenda of putting morality into the mix of the WWII bombings, it does not exactly give an impartial account of the bombing. If an outsider who knew nothing about the war were to read this, they would immediately think of the Japanese as the good guys and Americans as evil. An example of Hersey’s biased views is how he portrayed the co-pilot of plane that bombed Hiroshima as a money-hungry drunk. Maybe he was; maybe he wasn’t. The reader will never know because that’s all the author gives us about him.

This and other readying applies to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in the respect that the more the reader embellishes one side of the story(position) the less valid the piece as a whole seems(momentum). For example, I was really angered by a recent news story about a whale trainer being killed by a captive whale during a training session at Sea World. The story described how the whale brutally shook around the trainer like a rag doll and violently drowned her. The story neglects to tell how taking a whale out of the wild and forcing it to perform tricks in a small pool may be inhumane and cause the animal to be angered, which every animal trainer should know upon entering the profession. Upon reading the article, it lost its legitimacy for me right away because it neglected to mention all of the wrongdoings and controversies of the situation.

In Boswell’s biography of Johnson, although he creates his own scenarios, and mentions his personal prominence in the articles, he seems to keep the position up to the reader. In the article, The Ultimate Literary Portrait,  he points out that no one is perfect and he will put the good with that bad in his biography. He points out that Johnson was partially blind deaf, and freakishly tall. He recalls his snobbishness to him upon first impression. Although he does attribute Johnson some qualities of a hero, her does put in negative qualities and quirks that make the reader more likely to believe that story. By making the position he holds on Johnson vague, he increases the momentum for the reader to consider his work accurate.

An even more vague position is fly-on-the-wall reporting, which allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about a situation. This style occurs when the writer’s prominence is not present in his story and he does not make scenes of situations. This style would give the most momentum and capacity for accuracy. Even a tape recorder could affect objective reality. If a person knows he or she is being recorded and can be held accountable for the things divulged, this may deter the speaker from giving facts that may be negative towards themselves or their kin.

Overall, I do not think many literary pieces are written impartially. And in some cases, when the general story is already known, the author may justify presenting the less popular subject’s story by the assumption of the reader’s prior knowledge of the event at hand. Do you think that Hersey is objective in his sympathies with the Japanese due to the assumption of prior knowledge by American readers on WWII and the Hiroshima bombings?  What about Daniel Defoe’s portrayal of Jonathan Wild?