First reactions to Wikipedia's NPOV:
1. The NPOV guide says that the aim is to "fairly represent all sides of a dispute." Journalistically, I like that. Because the objectivity code is usually limited to fairly representing "both sides of a dispute," i.e. to reducing all public matters of disagreement into two warring sides.
2. The goal of NPOV is to write "unbiased text." Again, sounds good for an encyclopedia. If I want to read the entry on, say, Neoplatonism, I would like to learn exactly what the philosophy states and who its major practitioners were -- as opposed to reading an entry written by someone bent on debunking the philosophy. I'll trust Wikipedia to the degree I believe its authors try to edit out such bias.
3. The word "unbiased" in #2 has a superficial appeal journalistically, of course. "Does the media have a liberal or conservative bias?" is the question of the day. The question assumes we would like a media without bias, which NPOV, again superficially, would seem to promise. But let's go on.
4. "Articles without bias describe debates fairly rather than advocating any side of the debate," the guide says. Now we are getting into the meat of things. And I am starting to ask myself, in what way is an encyclopedia entry different from a newspaper article? Are there, or should there be, different standards applied? I'll stick to what I said above, about going to Wikipedia to learn about Neoplatonism. But if I am reading a newspaper, do I expect, or want, every reporter to bring scrupulous neutrality to an article on, say, global warming? Or do I want the reporter to tell me which of the various arguments or statements about global warming appear, in his expert (at whatever level) view, to be convincing or legitimate?
5. Is it not true that journalists, unlike encyclopedia writers, are always at the heart of a current burning public dispute? Might not NPOV under such circumstances be an impossible ideal to achieve? Ivory tower encyclopedia entry writers sit in their campus offices writing out of books against a deadline of several months. Journalists sit in newsrooms on a deadline of minutes, with their ears burning and their minds spinning from their ten latest interviews. In the latter case, might not a better recourse than NPOV for a journalist be recourse to news judgment -- not only what is news but what is the nugget of true and believable and useful news buried in the cacophony that must, much of it, be reported. An argument made for the credibility of one or another point of view could be made, along with disclosure of the journalist's point of view, if needed. Whereas the encyclopedia writer has the luxury of constructing a text that is more scrupulously balanced and neutral, perhaps. Bottom line, it is perhaps journalistically both more practical, more honest and thus more desirable, to be transparent as to point of view while writing on deadline, than it is to use writing forms that do little more than create a misleading facade of neutrality for readers. Again, just preliminary thoughts. But it seems there some important differences between the Wikipedia NPOV and what a journalist could practically use.
More tomorrow.
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