I read quite an interesting article recently about how the newspaper industry is changing due to consolidation. (It's here, but behind a paywall: http://harpers.org/archive/2012/09/0084046)

This article traces the cause of a demand for objectivity in journalism to the shift, in the 1960s and '70s, away from Citizen Kane-style private ownership to corporate ownership of newspapers: "Publicly traded conglomerates such as Times Mirror, Knight-Ridder, and Gannett bought up large swaths of the industry. And once shareholder returns became the priority, corporate overseers began pressing for consolidation, newsroom cuts, and other vaunted `efficiencies.'...To be fair, this new model had its upside for civic life: a press more focused on objectivity and sales-generating scoops than on promoting any particular proprietor's ideology, personal investments, or pet causes."

The downside of that shift has been the disappearance of markets with multiple independent newspapers. According to the article, the percentage of U.S. cities with at least two competing daily newspapers fell from 58 percent in 1910 to 2 percent (!) in 1971. I'm sure it's even lower now. The article goes on to trace the chilling effects this disappearance of local competition has had as corporate conglomerates, no longer as profitable as they once were, sell off small local papers that now have a monopoly on their local market to private owners with political motivations.

But the point relevant here is that the expectation of "objectivity" from journalists is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that has been magnified to inhuman levels by media consolidation. When you only have one place to turn for your local news, any identifiable perspective looks like a slant. (A further confirming data point: I once read an essay by George Orwell, who in many columns for the Tribune happily and openly discusses the paper's political slant, in which he lamented the steep decline in the number of daily papers in London...to something like a dozen.) Journalistic objectivity is almost a straw man, a stand in for the thing we really need in the news business: a greater number of independent perspectives.

On the other hand, I have often heard a claim that I think has some truth to it but may seem opposed to this one. The ubiquity of modern media puts media consumers in a paradox of choice: since there's so many choices for where to get news, people tend to just select the one source whose perspective they agree with, and ignore the others. That claim, if true, would seem to contradict the idea that what media consumers really want is a greater number of perspectives.

But I think, actually, the two claims are compatible. First of all, the claim that the demand for journalistic objectivity is a product of the decline of competition in news is, in the first instance, a claim about local news markets, whereas I mostly see the "paradox of choice" argument made in connection with national news media. Second, to the extent that the claims are about the same media sources or markets, they are only incompatible if the paradox-inducing array of choices for media are truly providing independent perspectives. Having a lot of choices only leads to paradox if you can't figure out what differentiates the options. That, anyway, has been my own experience: I don't generally seek national news from multiple sources because, whenever I look at other options, they all seem to be reporting the same thing in much the same way.

In short, it looks to me like the answer to both the unrealistic demand for objectivity and the paradox of media choice is to have a greater number of independent perspectives in news media. I hesitate to summarize this as a need for "more competition" in news media; there's a lot of competition already between the corporate conglomerates already, but that hasn't led to more independent perspectives. We need more of a certain kind of competition, competition that I think will only arise among local, independently-owned news sources.