“The Author as Producer” by Walter Benjamin

 

            Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer” addresses questions of content and form, and the reality and responsibility of the writer in radical culture. The article really makes me reflect on my position as a writer in society, a concept that has preoccupied me constantly throughout this final term of mine at WLU Brantford.

            The greatest point I take from his article is the difference between the “informing writer” and the “operating writer.” The former can be seen as our traditional, mainstream journalist with his quest for objectivity, balance, fairness and fact. The latter, on the other hand, is engaged with his publics. He’s a part of his audience. In short, he’s a man of the people. This is the kind of writer I want to be, like Tretiakov, who doesn’t idly stand and report. He generates, he moves, he creates culture more than he tries to somehow capture it. This is writing for more than entertainment, it’s writing with a purpose. It’s the purpose of writing.

            Benjamin discusses the process of production in terms of culture, like writing. Or in this case journalism. And it brings me full circle back to the idea of being a self-publisher, of citizen journalism, and of producing media free of the standard practices of the news industry as it is practiced today.

            Towards the end of the article Benjamin brings up the “epic dramatist” and this is how he explains it in writing, “It is less concerned with filling the public with feelings, than with alienating it in an enduring manner, through thinking, from the condition in which it lives.” I learned this myself through my writings in JN303: Public Journalism and Social Advocacy, when I realized that unfamiliarity is much more purposeful than unfamiliarity, in terms of what I want to evoke in my audience while I’m writing.

            And as a journalist, I came to find that this was an extremely effective approach to interpretive, ethnographic writing – and I was able to use it because as the author, I was also the producer. Controlling the apparatus of production – which was my blog in this case – gave me a kind of literary freedom that let me tap into a powerful new way of storytelling. Leave a comment below if you’re interested in reading these pieces, I’ll send you a sample.

“A Little Birdie Told Me” via The Toronto Star

The article, “A little birdie told me,” in the Toronto Star discusses the growing digital divide, by commenting on the two different types of interpretations available to the public during the G20 – that of the mainstream news and that of the citizen-driven social media superstar, Twitter.

            While the news on television took a predictability negative position against the protestors, and relied on official sources from within the police force, twitter was the eyes and ears of the citizens.

            Personally I’m a huge fan of Twitter, and lately I think this article can be applied to the revolutions happening in Egypt and Libya. While this was going on, I had first started up my Twitter account, and of course these topics became a major concern of mine. I didn’t follow journalists from CNN or CBS or FOX or CBC or wherever, I was following citizens on the ground involved in the protests, tweeting first hand what they were seeing and doing and thinking.

            While this was happening, a tsunami hit Japan and caused catastrophic loss of life and damage. Predictably, almost all coverage of the peoples’ revolutions in the Middle East was cut in favor of the shock and awe of natural disaster coverage that Western media knows generates eyeballs. The same principles of coverage that had mainstream media covering property damage and the minority group of disruptive miscreants that infiltrated the protesters’ circles at the G20 summit.

            Herein lays the power of Twitter. On Twitter, I read a message that came up under the hashtag #AJforum – The Al Jazeera Forum – discussing Twitter’s role in these tumultuous times. “Twitter is like putting an f1 engine in a revolution, it allows information to reach a critical mass in record time.” The real-time nature of twitter is its greatest strength, and can help organize and move people just as much as it can help people monitor a particularly public situation.

Indymedia.org by Dorothy Kidd

Dorothy Kidd talks about the website, indymedia.org, and the Independent Media Centre as a “new communications commons,” and essentially putting the media back in the hands of the people, free of the standardized practices of professional mainstream media – practices that typically cripple the democratic sensibilities of a once noble and well-minded social and cultural institution – now a profit-seeking monopoly of a few powerful interests.

            Individuals from various institutions and locations collaborate on the indymedia project to bring to the public a variety of neglected, dismissed and down-trodden perspectives from minority groups across the globe. The project is collaboration of sixty autonomously operated and linked websites from all over the world: it’s a globalized effort to take the media back from the corporate superpowers that dominate the information going out to the public realm and control public discourse.

            It’s a do-it-yourself approach to taking back the media. The Israeli sites banner reads, “You are your own journalist,” and the Italian site’s reads, “Don’t hate the media – Become the media,” and as Kidd says basically sums up their approach to citizen journalism.

            And they’re inspirational. In the hands of the right people, the communications technologies available today can empower individuals with a sense for democratic information dissemination and ultimately sway the tide of battle against globalized, corporatized news institutions. 

            After 9/11 the IMC featured stories on anti-war protestors both at home and abroad that the mainstream news ignored, because the mainstream news couldn’t afford to side against the administration and take a stance against what we now know was an unwinnable war supported on a bedrock of lies. I think this contrast sums up the biggest difference between mainstream media and organizations like the IMC. Independent news organizations don’t have to succumb to external pressures like advertisers when putting together a story, so they’re more capable of serving the public interest. As I said, we now know invading Iraq was not in the public interest, the unfortunate thing is that organizations like the IMC ultimately receive more attention from national security agencies than the public. Clearly they need to redefine their approach.

“News Quality Differences in Online Newspaper and Citizen Journalism Sites” by Serena Carpenter

Serena Carpenter looks to compare the “quality of news” as presented by online newspaper sites – mainstream journalists – and citizen journalism sites. The article hits some great points, noting that mainstream journalists use more sources, citizen journalists are more concerned with local news, mainstream journalists present a variety of viewpoints, while citizen journalists typically have strong perspectives that usually come through in the news they produce.

But is it even possible to define “quality of news”? News quality should be defined according to the ideals of the institution it is designed to protect: democracy.

Let’s consider capitalism. The mainstream news industry is a monopolistic monster that dominated the airwaves and controls the public discourse by regulating the flow and form of information entering the public sphere. In our neoliberalist era, citizen journalism can represent a form of free enterprise, an entrepreneurial frontier to reclaim the news and put it back in the hands of the individual citizen – it can be the clearest realization of freedom of the press, and in fact, is a return to origin.

Citizen journalism is just like the “penny press” of old – pure journalism, without all the pretention of professional journalism’s principles and norms that are really only in place to maintain profitability in an overly corporatized social institution. It’s important to remember that journalism is a social institution.

And since it is, it only makes sense that it is returned to the hands of the citizens. This is a capitalistic economy – those citizen journalists, regardless of the quality of news as judged next to the broken mainstream institution, who have the ability (whether it be their writing, their particular point of view, their resources or their presentation) to engage and captivate the widest audience will be the most successful. And they will do so their own way, with an entrepreneurial spirit and maybe without even thinking about it, with the purity of democracy as it was originally intended to exist.

Panopticism as explained by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault’s concept of panopticism is used to explain the power relations of society. According to Foucault it’s the act of surveillance that roots power systems in society, internalizes these systems, and ultimately conditions citizens to behave in a certain way.

            The panopticon is visualized as a central tower, alone in a courtyard surrounded by a building made up of cells where the prisoners are left to their own devices. Though they’re left in this way, their cells are transparent on two ends – the one closest to the tower and the one opposite – so that the prisoners are essentially backlit and left naked for the anonymous viewers of the tower to observe at will. The prisoners don’t know when they’re being observed, or even who they’re being observed by.

            According to Foucault, this system of surveillance is employed in all manner of social structures and is effective in increasing productivity, develop the economy, spread education and to raise the level of public morality.

            Not knowing when one is being watched, but always aware at any moment that one can be watched, is the central idea of panopticism. It forces those who exist in this particular social structure to alter their behavior accordingly. To Foucault, panopticism is a system of discipline. But what seems to be missing is Foucault’s claim that those in the tower should be susceptible to surveillance at any given time as well – and this in turn keeps those in power in check as well.

            The media, traditionally, has served this particular function – or at least was supposed to. Too much manipulation has left the media (most of the media, there are still some practicing good, quality, important journalism) ineffectual and incapable of entering the central tower.

            Enter citizen journalism. As explained in a previous reflection, can be the new force to enter the tower, to keep the powers that be in check. Now, thanks to social media and tools built into basically every cell phone on the market – and the fact that virtually every citizen has a cell phone – as well as the increasing prevalence of laptops and portable communications tools, there are almost as many tools of surveillance in the hands of the citizenry as there are in the hands of the powerful structures that monitor the citizens. Hopefully, Foucault’s panopticism can be a concept that is fully realized, not taken halfway there and used to dishonestly discipline the public.

G2: Life Through a Lens” via The Guardian

Are we slaves to our cell phones? Or are these instruments of liberation? Stuart Jeffries contemplated this in a Guardian article, and after reading it I’ve thought about it as well.

            Jeffries reflection comes as he’s trying to take in a sight at the Victoria and Albert museum, and his view is obstructed by an unruly visitor who keeps blocking everyone else’s view, so that he can capture the moment with his cell phone camera.

            He reflects on the many uses of cell-phone cameras and the pictures they take, from museum loiterers who want to decorate their facebook pages, enthusiastic concert goers and eager parents who want to make a memory last. He also illustrates the seedier ways cell phone cameras are being used: the “upskirt” phenomenon for instance, or citizen celebrity paparazzi-ism. With that, Jeffries touches on the most important consideration to come about on the wings of the cell phone revolution: citizen journalism.

            Sure, we can say that we’re all “slaves to our cell phones” that we constantly check and recheck on the hour, but our cell phones can also be used as tools of liberation. Having a camera on us at all times means we can more fully realize Foucault’s concept of panopticism – consider the beatings of Adam Nobody at the G20 summits. Adam was beaten to the ground by Toronto police, and it was all captured by another protester’s cell phone camera. Cell phone cameras in the hands of responsible citizens can help maintain surveillance on those in power and those who wish to be in power. And local police will think twice about attacking protesters, next time.

Photos of Gang Rape go Viral” via the Globe and Mail

We live in a strange new age. An article published in the Globe and Mail in 2010, titled “Photos of gang rape go viral” proves this point. A 16-year-old girl attended a rave, and according to police may have been given a date-rape drug. What happened next was a disturbing revelation of society in the modern age.

            The young girl was repeatedly raped by a number of male attackers, attackers identified as mostly minors and young adults. But perhaps the most disturbing part of this story is how the girl, who was unable to recall the events of the night due to the effects of the drug, came to understand what had happened to her.

            She found out on Facebook where so many of this digital age go to find the latest “headlines” or personal news of their peers and associates. The shock and horror that must’ve confronted this girl when she logged on and found photos of her body being violated broadcast to her network on the internet.

            Horrifically, the police – including the RCMP – had an incredible amount of difficulty preventing the photos which had been “shared, saved and reposted,” from reappearing on the popular social networking site.

            The reality is that these photos are considered child pornography. One would think that Facebook – one of the most prolific websites – would do everything in its power to prevent the photos from resurfacing – again, and again, and again.

            What responsibility do the superpowers of the internet have in preventing these kinds of crimes from occurring – or re-occurring? The reality is that we live in an age when everyone can share everything. We can’t solely rely on the dominant forces of the internet – the 21^st century’s powers-that-be, as it were – to monitor and control online behavior. We need to be moving towards a new state of social responsibility, amongst ourselves and our peers, to prevent this kind of atrocity from happening ever again. Although I can’t help but wonder, without facebook and the despicable spread of these images, would the offenders have ever been brought to justice?

The Crisis of Journalism and the Internet

Reflecting on Robert W. McChesney’s “The Crisis of Journalism and the Internet”…

In an earlier post I said there are those suggesting that we’re in the early stages of a new social reform, one that will include drastic changes to the structure of the Western media and the way it operates.

I was talking about Robert W. McChesney (specifically his and John Nicols’ 2002 book, Our Media, Not Theirs: The democratic struggle against corporate media).

To quote McChesney at length: “I believe (democratic journalism) must provide a rigorous accounting of people who are in power and people who wish to be in power, in both the government and corporate sectors. It must have a plausible method to separate truth from lies, or at least prevent liars from getting away scot-free. And it must prove a wide range of informed opinions on the most important issues of our times; not only the issues of the day, but the major issues that loom on the horizon. These issues cannot be determined primarily by what people in power are talking about. Journalism must provide our early warning system. It is not necessary that all news media provide all these services; that would be impractical. It is necessary that the media system as a whole make such journalism a realistic expectation for the citizenry.” 

The fact that journalism has failed to live up to this expectation, that in fact these expectations seem so truly unrealistic, is why McChesney believes we are experiencing a crisis of journalism.

“What does the crisis of journalism entail? The corruption of journalism, the decline of investigative reporting, the degeneration of political reporting and international journalism, the absurd horserace coverage of campaigns, the collapse of local journalism, the increasing prevalence of celebrity and scandal…”

There are those who would say that this crisis has been brought on by the internet, that this latest innovation in communications technology has siphoned off resources from traditional journalism, and created unfair competition for the dominant commercial news media, but McChesney disagrees. According to him, the crisis was in play long before the internet was ever a “threat”.

The real cause of the crisis was the professionalization of journalism. To understand this, we need to look into the past.

“Professional journalism” was not defined by journalists, or the public at large which they are meant to serve. Media owners and their commercial interests are what came to define the “professional” journalist. And this is when we began to move away from the democratic journalism our society needs to thrive politically and culturally.

The first notable result of the professionalization of journalism was the increasing dependence on “official sources”. As newsrooms shrunk and looked to cut costs, there was less time and fewer resources left for journalists to put together stories the old-fashioned way – research and reporting – so more and more they were forced to take at face-value information distributed from officials within institutions that were previously open to the journalist’s critique.

McChesney cites the most powerful example of the reliance on official sources in the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where even the prestigious New York Times and Washington Post had issued apologies to their readers for printing lies and exaggerations that led the USA to an “unnecessary, illegal and disastrous war.” According to a study from by the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity (CPI) there were 935 lies designed to garner public support for the war – with “several hundred” coming from President Bush and Vice President Cheney. How could the media have fed blatant lies to the public realm?

To understand the media we need to understand the political economy of the media, and the first place to look is towards its structures.

McChesney states, “It is not that owners and advertisers and managers need to directly interfere with or censor editors and journalists; it is more the case that organizational structures transmit values that are internalized by those who successfully rise to the top.”

Simply put, professional norms – like the reliance on official sources, the popularity of celebrity and scandal pieces, the rating-boosting coverage of sensational crime and natural disaster stories – have been internalized by practicing journalists to such an extent that it’s the only way they know to climb to the top of the corporate food chain. And it’s what the citizenry has come to expect of journalism itself.

As I discussed in a previous post, technological innovation has a way of altering a professional environment, and sometimes it’s the professional who notices last.

What we need to hope is that the internet is capable of bringing changes to the political economy of the media, by opening more doors and dissolving the barriers between journalist and citizen, author and producer, form and content. If we are in fact in the early stages of a new media reform, it will certainly be brought on the wings of the internet.

There are, of course, many more things to consider. Such as control and ownership of the internet, Net Neutrality, and free and ubiquitous internet access for all. But that’s another post, for another day…

In Praise of Scribes

“OUR SOCIAL TOOLS REMOVE OLDER OBSTACLES TO PUBLIC EXPRESSION, AND THUS REMOVE THE BOTTLENECKS THAT CHARACTERIZED MASS MEDIA. THE RESULT IS THE MASS AMATEURIZATION OF EFFORTS PREVIOUSLY RESERVED FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS.”

Recently I read Chapter 3 of Clay Shirky’s 2008 work, Here Comes Everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. The chapter is called “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” and it details one of my favorite debates: Who controls publishing in the 21st Century, and how should we define “journalist”?

Before I dive into it, I want to talk about another text Shirky references: Johannes Trithemius‘ Laude Scriptorum, whom I stole the name of this post’s headline from. Trithemius wrote his treatise – a public protest – in 1492, as he dismayingly watched the extinction of the scribe. Scribes, as you should know, were devoted monks who committed their lives to literacy and the art of writing. They were the sole publishers of their time, the gatekeepers of the old world, and all written words flowed from their pious penmanship.

That is, until the printing press came along – a monumental gamechanger. Literacy began spreading among the people, and while printed material wasn’t everywhere yet, Johannes Gutenberg certainly invented the wheel it needed to get there. 

Soon scribes were obsolete. Their only resources – literacy, the power to print – were being relinquished to the masses at an exponential rate they couldn’t possibly keep up with. It was a “democratization of knowledge,” or at least it was meant to be…

Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, prints his hopeless treatise in – what else? – a machine of movable type, and as that last plate slams down into paper, you swear the finality of that strike sounds like the last nail in a heavy, heavy coffin…

Lest we forget, the medium undermines the message.

So let’s think about the internet, as the newest and most controversial medium since television came around.

“Tell me how could you compromise yourself like this…?”

These are strange times. Some think we might be witnessing the dawn of a revolution – a revolution of the information environment, of media reform – that is riding swiftly on the wings of our latest technological innovation, that which we all know and love: the internet.

According to Shirky the professional community most affected by this invention is the journalist’s. So let’s quickly go over what he has to say about the journalist as a professional.

“Most professionals exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management,” he says. When you think of the resources a journalist controls, the first two that come to my mind are 1) information, of course and 2) publicity. Without this to trade off, the journalist is really in charge of nothing, and in fact can create nothing. Journalists, as the producers of these commodities, serve as the new societal gatekeepers who determine who and what make it into the information environment. They provide the public realm with the information they need to facilitate democratic dialogue.

Or they were supposed to, as the founding fathers argued.   

Shirky claims, “A professional learns things in a way that differentiates her from most of the populace, and she pays as much or more attention to the judgment of her peers as to the judgment of her customers when figuring out how to do her job.” As professionals, we begin, throughout our constant education and our interaction with others within our profession, to shape our world view in a way that relates to whatever it is we dedicate ourselves to.

The problem with this is that the professional outlook becomes a hindrance, one that can blind the professionals from seeing immediate changes in the structure of the environment they thrive in. In this case, Shirky argues that the media industry – and the journalists that fuel it – were late to understand the way their environment was forever changed, thanks to the influence of individuals like yours truly – bloggers.

The formerly closed circuit of controlling production, reproduction and distribution in the information environment has been blown away. No longer is the media industry the sole arbiter of information dissemination. Thanks to sites like WordPress, anyone and everyone can publish content for the public to assimilate – like I’m doing right now.

This, Shirky refers to as the mass amateurization of the media. The professional norms of journalism – things like deadlines, news cycles, notions of form and content, “objectivity, balance and fairness”, newsworthiness, and traditional ethics – have been obliterated by a mass of individuals taking the initiative to generate their own dialogue, and amplify their voice within the public realm.

Is this good or bad? Well, that depends on who you ask.

But the hat goes deeper. With today’s growing repertoire of communications tools, it’s becoming easier to network and spread information in a way that traditional media just didn’t see coming.

For example, I’ll refer you to my colleague Cody Pytlak’s blog, where he writes passionately about the Colorado Avalanche. From his sidebar, a reader can jump to other Avs writers’ pages, hockey blogs and even facts and stats on the great sport of hockey. Show me a newspaper or a television channel with this kind of referencing ability.

And my personal favorite, hyperlinking, is a powerful way to engage readers with tons of useful background information, without having to explain it all myself.

The thing is, the media industry knows that all of us amateurs publishing independent content on the web are lacking in a certain amount of credibility – but we are influencing our friends and close networks, and as networks begin networking with other networks and so on etc… You get the idea. My friends in the public relations industry already know this, and they’re way ahead of the curve compared to journalism and its owners.

The technology of the internet has shifted the ability to influence and persuade the public back into the hands of the public itself. As the printing press spread literacy, the internet is spreading publicity.

“Tell me how could you blame anyone else when you aren’t really committed…?”

But why are we even bothering? That’s the question I think is most important here. Traditional journalism created a vacuum in the public realm, in terms of democratic conversation. Jon Stewart knows this, and so far he’s one of the few to try and do something about it. Now, given the tools to make it happen, citizens have stepped in to fill the void – but I’m going to save that conversation for an upcoming post on citizen journalism and its positive and negative impacts.

Professional journalism, as it’s practiced today, is arguably doing serious harm to our democratic way of life. All you need to see to understand this is virtually any coverage of a political campaign or election in either Canada or the United States media. There’s no reasonable dialogue here, and the public is blatantly excluded from the democratic process.

Shirky says the question is “who should we consider a journalist?” and “who should enjoy journalistic privilege?” (As in the confidentiality of sources, for example). Well, that’s an entirely different subject, one that I hope to get to the bottom of with this blog. I’ve got a few ideas of my own, but they’re going to have to wait.

In the meantime, I’ll sit back and watch the professional journalist go the way of the scribe, and revel in the finality of my keystrokes and the sweet click of my mouse as I eagerly hit “Publish.”

Dr. Gonzo or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Bias, and Love the Slant

Okay, I’m going to try to keep this tight. I’m also going to try to keep any further rant-ish posts to a minimum, but…

We need to talk about journalism. I’ve spent enough years in school studying and practicing it to assign myself credit to spit out some ramblings on the subject. After all, there isn’t much else to do on this post-St. Patrick’s Day afternoon, writing to you from the heart of downtown Brantford, Ontario, Canada…

Hmm, that’s a good place to start.

I’m from St. Catharines, which isn’t much of a place in itself. A border town with 130,000ish people that’s cut in half by the QEW into North and South ends. There’s a mall, a university, and all sorts of things you’d expect from a small-to-mid-sized-town in Ontario. I lived there until I turned 18, graduated highschool and realised it was time to go.

Like every other Romeo out there I followed a girl to university. A mistake I’d quickly learn I made, sure, but there’s no use in getting bitter about it now. In fact I’d like to believe there’s at least one thing I can pull from this whole awful experience.

It’s that it was awful.

I know, that sounds strange.

But here’s the thing:

I’ve been doing a lot of writing about this twisted little town recently, a ton of fiction and a few journalism pieces. There’s one thing I’ve noticed about these stories – I have a hard time finding anything nice to say about this city.

“If you got nothin’ nice to say don’t say nothin’ at all.”

Well, pardon me, but fuck that.

If I wrote something like this:

Warmth and jubilance is everywhere. High school kids, abandoning class in exchange for the fresh spring air, ride bikes and skateboards through Harmony Square as the cheerful city workers dismantle the thawed skating rink. I listen to the soft jazz and whimsical laughter permeating the air between the occasional rushing of traffic on either end of this perfectly serene moment. 

I would feel like a phony. Because that’s exactly what I would be.

Let’s try this one out instead:

On March 18, 2011, teenagers occupy Brantford’s Harmony Square on their skateboards and bicycles. City workers take apart the wooden frame of the melted skating rink. Pedestrains mingle here and there. In a bulldozer-type vehicle, one man scoops up slushy snow and piles it on the Colborne Street end of the rink, which in the spring and summer months becomes a fountain that sprays water 10 feet into the air to splash back down on its concrete base.

That looks something like what we’re taught professional journalism should be. The facts, stripped and barren, left for the reader to interpret. You might be thinking that the first piece was a higher calibre piece of writing.

You might be thinking you enjoyed reading it more.

 Now I just want to take one more stab at painting you a picture:

You’re sitting in Coffee Culture, peering through the glass wall to watch the going ons in downtown Brantford. Everything turns gold, you see teenagers who have probably skipped school for the afternoon furiously riding their bikes in a mad circle around the shallow pond that used to be the Harmony Square skating rink. The runt in the pack struggles to keep up on his skateboard and a bobcat’s engine roars, switches gears and scoops up piles of slush and snow to dump at the other end of the square. The sun disappears into a sheath of heavy cloud. “Nothing gold can stay,” you remind yourself and your heart sinks when you watch a girl, maybe fourteen, on the other side of the glass, buy something in a small plastic bag off of a tall old man in a grey down vest.

Now you get the point. This last example is obviously slanted, and its loaded with my own personal bias. Not a bias I invented intentionally to create a certain feeling, like the first piece. And it’s certainly not censored and stripped of literary vitality like the second piece. Simply put, this is my natural bias coming through and leaving the reader to interpret that for him/herself.

There’s a feeling that I created (I hope) when you read the third piece. I’ve done certain things – slipped in parts of myself that make my writing really mine – and shifted into the second-person perspective, which among other classified trade-secret reasons, I used to increase the subjectivity of the reader’s experience. I picked up from Foucault that reading should be more of an experience than anything else, so I’ve worked to make reading the third piece not only informative, but experiential for you as the reader as well. And I didn’t censor a damn thing, including the drug deal my friends and I witnessed from our creaky leather chairs on the other side of the glass.

Am I getting a little abstract?

We need to understand that we all have a bias, one that’s damn near impossible to suppress, and as a writer the job is to be as transparent as possible about whatever lens it is that the bias is filtering reality through. Journalism needs to drop the act that it stands as some sort of bulletproof Superman of objectivity, balance and fairness. It just doesn’t exist. Hunter S. Thompson might’ve been a bit of a wild animal, but he was certainly aware of this. And he wasn’t the only one, but he is one of the greatest and clearest examples of a journalist being honest with his readers in terms of how he was filtering reality. Just read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

When you learn to love your bias, when you embrace it – and you’re honest with your slant and yourself – you’re writing will take on a far more powerful presence.

And you just might find that the crooked way you look at things can reveal a whole lot more about the truth than a balanced fact ever could.