Electoral Word of the Day: Dislosure

Today's Electoral Word of the Day (or, EWD, if you're hip) is "disclosure".

The traditional, modern presumed role of journalists is as a mere conveyor of information, similar to a telephone.

The telephone has no political, religious, class, economic, ethnic or gender bias, it simply transmits what came in at a mouthpiece out to a speaker at some other location.

Journalism without bias was marketing reaction to the excesses of the beginnings of modern journalism when newspapers existed to promote a (usually) economic agenda.

It was these biases that spurred Charles Dickens to write his serialized tales of multiple cities, Oliver Twist's saga and Scrooge's Christmas carol.

The Heart of Darkness, eventually reinterpreted as the movie Apocalypse Now, was also an attempt to tell a story under-reported in the "mainstream media" (or, MSM, if you're hip) about social injustice in Africa.

This supposed height of journalistic integrity, however, has never been realistic.

Surprisingly, it turns out, journalists are mere human beings, with ingrained biases, and the medium in which journalists work impose an additional bias on top of whatever human baggage an individual may have.

A Canadian journalist working at a television station on Vancouver Island may have a different perspective on logging protests in his logging dependent town than a journalist from Vancouver (or, British Columbia's largest clear cut, if you're hip).

Further, a journalist in television may cover a story because it has good visuals, where a print or radio journalist may not cover that same story at all.

E-journalism bridges that gap, but not the gap of bias.

This long, wordy, prelude is to declare my left of centre bias, as if that wasn't obvious in previous posts.

More than that, I am a left leaning Christian, which isn't an oxymoron, despite what a former date might have thought.

My declaration is not an apology, but if this blog is to be informative, which I hope it is, one needs to understand where it comes from.

I intend to present all views in the upcoming elections fully and fairly, but I'm not going to pretend I'm something I'm not.

That won't do anybody any good.

Related Links
Bah, let's skip links today. I was just going to link to myself anyway.