Welcome to the Eric Erickson Show podcast, Our 2.

Hello America. It is Eric Erickson here. I hope you are doing well. The phone number,

if you want to be on the program, 877973-725.

Phone lines are open and operators are standing by, so to speak.

Now, I got to begin with this story that is, it's infuriating me to no end.

This is not the big story of the day.

I did not want to give it disproportionate attention as the big story of the day because

when you hear, you'll understand it's not the high drama of the day, but it is a problem.

This is an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Leonard Downey Jr.

He is a former executive editor of the Washington Post and a professor of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

And he laments the idea of objectivity in the press.

He's a liberal.

He was the executive editor of the Washington Post from 91 to some such, I think to the early 2000s. He's, I mean, he probably would not characterize himself as a liberal, but he's a liberal.

And I need to read you part of this piece that he wrote.

Amid all the profound challenges and changes roiling the American news media today,

newsrooms are debating whether traditional objectivity should still be the standard for news reporting.

Objectivity is defined by most dictionaries as expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, biases, feelings, or prejudice.

Journalistic objectivity has been generally understood to mean much the same thing. But increasingly, reporters, editors, and media critics argue that the concept

of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality. They point out that the standard was

dictated over years or over decades by male editors in predominantly white newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world.

They believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading both sidesism in covering stories about race, the treatment of women,

LGBTQ plus rights, income inequality, climate change, and many other subjects.

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