Cunningham and McGill

The problem, as presented by both Cunningham and McGill is that being objective has boiled down to reporting in a he said/she said style. Basically collecting info from opposing viewpoints in a given situation and reporting what both sides said and claimed to have done. That leaves very little room for truth. That could very easily result in a story like “The sky is red”, where one group claims that our sky is red , and they are opposed another claiming that is purple, and the reporter cannot include a line to say that the sky looks blue. Cunningham offers the story of a reporter writing about felony cases being lost due to heavy workloads. He found what was happening, but could not get anyone to go on the record about the subject. The reporter was unable to get his story published with a source other than himself. He could not publish what he knew to be true. This is why newspapers can’t say someone is lying. Doing so would involve deeper reporting, on the record confirmation of the liars knowledge to the contrary, reporting truth (and knowing what that is), and not reporting “spin”.
Further complicating the issue is that there are many and varied expectations of the newspaper medium (and most other media as well). According to Mcgill, the list of expectations includes: fair, impartial, balanced, and objective to name a few. Those expectations don’t really all fit together. A story can be balanced but not fair, impartial, but not balanced and so on. So what to do? I would prefer to see reporting that is true, rather than “objective” as currently defined.
That brings me to the second question for our consideration; should our newspaper have a stated slant or worldview similar to their European counterparts? I think that that would be detrimental to our democracy, moving backward on an evolutionary scale, back to yellow journalism and muckraking. It might solve some of the woes of the newspaper business model, by catering a version of truth to a specific belief, but it would further divide our society.