The Guardian has what they call a “readers’ editor” who goes through the newspaper’s inbox and replies publicly to the crap that the cranks write in. Fun job! Anyway today they take on the burning question of whether “the Guardian's coverage of Venezuela is overly critical of the government and the president, Hugo Chávez.” Instead of the obvious quickie response (“duh”) Siobhain Butterworth decided to get to the bottom of it all by talking to the paper’s Latin America correspondent. [Oddly, Butterworth refuses to name the correspondent and just refers to him throughout the piece as “the correspondent,” which is dumb and annoying, because everybody knows his name is Rory Carroll and so we’ve included a photo of both correspondent and editor above]
Remarkably, Rory opens his heart and explains his daily struggle against the bourgeois notions of “impartiality” and “journalism," you see...
>>> “The correspondent doesn't regard himself as a ‘champion of impartiality.”Wow that last one is a relief because I just thought I was crazy. Butterworth cautions us not to get all worked up about Rory’s relationship with objectivity though, because basically there’s no law against it. You see, “the BBC is required to be impartial, and the Guardian is not.” So there you go.>>> “The correspondent's stories sometimes include his own point of view: ‘Some of the writing is observational,’ he told me.”
>>> “He agrees it can be difficult to separate fact and comment in this style of reporting.”
