A place for objectivity?

For the past three years, I have avoided the opinion page. There is a place for opinion and a place for news, and I preferred to deal with news.

News is objective. It deals with hard facts and seeks truth outside of the self. It's easy to disassociate the writer from a news story, because it's not about the writer. Their picture is not right there looking at you.

Watching the recent hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts, it appears that he is a fan of objectivity. The most common complaint from Roberts' opposition has been that they could not get a sense for who he was as a person. According to the Associated Press, he answered questions "through the prism of legal precedent," leaving personal views out of it. He was an excellent, well-prepared witness, and quoted sources with near-perfect memory. But this could not satisfy those who wanted to know his personal philosophy and convictions.

Some of them might explain their dissatisfaction with the fear that this apparent objectivity is merely a front and Roberts could follow the example of Judge Clarence Thomas, stating in the hearings that he "had no quarrel" with certain rulings or precedents and a short time later acting in strong opposition to similar rulings. However, leaving aside fearful distrust and political biases, we return to the question of how valid a stance of objectivity can be.

When it comes down to it, if law were completely objective, we could just program a computer algorithm and be done with it. That we don't - or perhaps can't - implies that there's more to justice than objectivity. Senator Durbin (D.Ill.) broached this issue during his questioning when he asked if Roberts "could see the people behind the precedents, the families behind the footnotes," as quoted on supremecourtwatch.org, Sept. 15.

We don't want justice to be objective, we want a human perspective. We don't want those determining our personal fate to look at situations from a cold, distant perspective of objectivity. We want them to see up close the subjective life we live.

Participants in last week's discussion on "Perspectives on News Reporting" noted that the position of journalists embedded up-close with victims of the hurricanes were more likely to demonstrate bias on behalf of those victims. In Iraq, where media was embedded with military troops, they distanced themselves much more easily from the suffering of the Iraqi people.

I still believe there are places for fact and objectivity. As elusive as the latter may be, it's a noble aim for journalism and court rulings, but not to the extent that it ignores subjective human needs and sufferings. So while I'll continue to respect the objectivity of newswriting, perhaps its time to give up my old qualms about the opinion page.