But as a newspaperman who believes that the men and women who gather and edit the news will have much to do with the survival of our society, I fear that the transition to the newspaper of the future is being made too slowly, much too slowly. Every branch of newsgathering and dissemination is still the prisoner of our spectator past. Both the ink and the vacuum tube branches are the victims of taboos and fetishes which they themselves have created. And some of the very virtues of American journalism have, I am afraid, become deadly virtuesalmost as deadly as sin itself. It is a discipline which reporters, editors and publishers impose upon themselves to keep their own feelings from affecting the presentation of the news.
Objectivity is therefore a fine ideal.
For more than 100 years American newspapers have been progressing toward this ideal. If you would examine the intensely partisan and sometimes venal newspapers of a century ago, you would see how far our newspapers have come. And if you went across the country and talked to newspapermen everywhere and analyzed their writings, you would find very few who were not striving to live up to the ideal of objectivity as they understand it. I have no objection to the ideal itself but only to our rigid and almost doctrinaire interpretation of objectivity. It seems to me that this narrow concept of objectivity sometimes brings us pretty close to the borders of irresponsibility.