Ace reporter Robert Fisk on American journos. He has it right. "Objectivity" and "balance" are not always useful things, except to publishers desperate to ensure that the only reality for the average Joe and Jane is the one the corporate managers allow portrayed on the editorial page.

I think we are dealing here with a problem in American journalism school, which thank god we brits don't go through. We do politics and history and other subjects at University. I think that the foreign correspondent is the nerve ending of a newspaper. My paper sends a correspondent to live abroad to tell us what happens there, not to tell us what two sides are saying, I can read that on the wire.

Over and over again for example, when I am in Jerusalem or Damascus, or Cairo, I talk to my American Colleagues. Who are just like me, same jobs much better salaries of course, but the same role. And what they tell me is fascinating. They really have a deep insight many of them, into what's happening in the region, but when I read their reports its not there. Everything they have to tell me of interest has been erased. when they want to put forth a point of view, they ring up some guy in America who has very little knowledge usually in one of the places I call the tink thanks, the think tanks, the Brookings institute, the Rand corporation, and this guy blathers on for two paragraphs of bland prose, and this is put in as opinion. But I want to know what the reporter thinks, if you send a reporter to a region, if you send him there because you think he is intelligent, fair, decent reporter; you don't have to ask him to give 50% of every paragraph to each side. I mean if you follow the rules that a journalist seems to have to follow in the Middle East, what do you do say if you cover the slave ship and the slavery campaign? Do you give the same amount of time to the slaves and the slave ship captain? Or what if you are covering the Second World War, do you give the same amount of time to prisoners and an SS guard? NO. You have to have some sense of morality, and passion and anger.

Read the rest of this fine Pacifica interview (via Znet).