Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

46 Online Journalism
hardly begins the list. Any serious analysis of an international situation
like the war in Kosovo in the same year must take account of a
myriad points of view – the very attempt to reduce the situation to a
simple conflict between NATO and Serbia must clearly be spurious to
even the most unsophisticated news consumer.
Pierre Bourdieu, writing in 1977 (Outline of a Theory of Practice)
suggests that objectivity is related to the process of mediation rather
than to the contingent world; that it allows, even insists upon,
readers or viewers taking up positions by presenting the social world
as a spectacle to which they are bound in a symbolic relationship.
Thus objectivity, guaranteed by the reader’s personal investment in
the events related in the text, is a function of the act of reading or
viewing; it serves to allow readers to deal with a complex and
shifting world in a metaphoric or symbolic way. Without that objectivity
the product of reading will become unfocused and
unproductive for the reader.
While what Ben Bagdikian has ironically elevated to the ‘doctrine
of objectivity’ 6 brought with it the undoubted benefit of tempering
a press which, in the early nineteenth century was given to hyperbole
or was even completely fictitious, it has limited advantages
today and serves particular and private agendas. There are yawning
problems with a system which completely excludes significant social
forces from public discourse as it attempts to represent a complex
and heterologic world for readers. There must be a better, let us say
less tendentious, way of documenting events. Perhaps the Internet
will lead us to it. By taking information from as many, and as wide a
range, of sources as possible and perhaps even by abandoning an
impossible objectivity for a reasoned subjectivity or reflexivity,
readers will be able to make up their minds for themselves. It is clear
from any tracking of a breaking news story on the Internet that the
reader is never going to be able to identify and consume ‘all’ the
information on the issue. There will always be that which remains
unknown and, indeed, it is often that elision which allows space for
critical thought. It is a perspective that John Merrill, long before the
Internet made it a real possibility, described as a function of ‘existential
journalism’.
After Sartre, Merrill understood the proper roles of journalism as
revealing to readers the ‘developing patterns of the social world, and
to disclose and judge social weaknesses’. This knowledge was