The Death of Objectivity

"Opinions. Ours, yours and theirs." This was the text of a Los Angeles Times advertisement touting the paper's political coverage. It ran on the back page of the California section, under the weather, which is perhaps the only truly objective pursuit of journalism today.
It used to be that journalists prided themselves on not having opinions - not having agendas or biases. It was regarded as a journalistic virtue to coolly report facts and give a detailed picture of the story while remaining objective. Today, that is not the case. Journalism has abandoned objectivity in favor of opinion reporting. You can see it on MSNBC, you can see it on Fox News, you can see it on the celebrity status reached by journalists like Anderson Cooper, and you can see it, certainly, in the "new guard" of journalism - the bloggers who take pride in flaunting their opinions across the internet.
The important question then is, does this abandoning of the journalistic virtue leave us, as a society looking to the news media for information, lacking? Or is it merely a journalistic adaptation to our world of increasing media proliferation?
I would argue the latter. The journalist's role as a keeper and disseminator of information has been made insignificant by the advent of the internet. The fact that official documents, expert opinions, and first-hand accounts are available at the click of a button means that the journalist is no longer needed to provide those things.
But it doesn't mean the journalist is no longer needed.
In fact, the role that the journalist plays today in aiding the public to understand the great tidal wave of information available on all topics is even more important than ever before. Just because statistics and quotations and video clips - all those components of a good journalism story - are available to the public doesn't mean that the public can fill in the gaps for itself. The sum of all the components of a story is not equal to that story.
There's a certain finesse to interpreting a story and making it understandable to the public, and this is the role for the journalist.
This role, believe it or not, can include articulating an opinion.
And so, as our news media turn away from the long-standing pillar of objectivity and new system which values the personal opinion of the journalist, we can understand it as more than just a selfish grappling for fame and fortune, but as a necessary adaptation to a society which has come to consume information and receive facts in a much different way than it did a decade ago. It's not necessary to talk of the abandonment of traditional journalistic values as the devolution of journalism. Rather, we can realize the changing environment in which we live and understand the factors that make it necessary to adapt. And, if we are all very understanding, we, as news consumers, can adapt too.