In a Zenit article titled “What is Good Journalism?,” author Marta Lugo interviews journalist and author Gabriel Galdón. He is professor of journalism and information ethics at Madrid’s CEU St. Paul University, and the director of the Observatory for the Study of Religious Information. By “objectivist” here, I take him to mean what American journalism professors teach as journalistic objectivity, i.e., reporting without political bias or any other slant that colors the information.
One of the problems of journalism’s objectivist paradigm is that there are million of events — published daily as news — that are of no use. They are ephemeral, vacuous and gobble up what is really essential. French writer Jean Guitton entitled one of his books “Silence sur l’essentiel” (Silence on the Essential). Often in the informative landscape there is silence on the essential and clamorous noise on the accidental and ephemeral.
Info-ethics calls, in the first place, for speaking about what people really need to know to be free and to struggle for their dignity. It is a different informative choice, but entails a radical change: from the “agenda setting” to the recipient.
