Those of you who visit regularly — via the old-fashioned Web, rather than RSS — will have noticed that shortly after the Personal Democracy Forum, the X-ray image over in the left-hand column got a new cutline: "Transparency is the new objectivity." As it says over there, it's a quote from David Weinberger, which he has now expanded in a blog post over on his site.

The idea of false objectivity in news has been floating around for a long time. There are several episodes of Rebooting the News where Jay Rosen and Dave Winer talk about the "View from Nowhere," and even Chip Scanlan, in his venerable J-school textbook Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century points out that "objectivity" was created by wire services in the 1860s so they could sell copy to papers of all partisan stripes.

And there are deep philosophical reasons to suspect claims of "objectivity." Weinberger, in the blog entry linked to above, slides right up to the edge of it when he talks about "the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report." More than one hundred years ago, philosopher Edmund Husserl came up with the term "bracketing" to describe a rigorously suspicious stance toward our experience and its relationship to truth: if all we ever have is our sensory data, how can we make claims about the accuracy of their relationship to the world outside our skin? This flavor of philosophical inquiry, called phenomenology, teaches us to regard any experience as subjective and conditioned. (Think about Neo in The Matrix and you'll see what Husserl was driving at.)

As Weinberger says:

At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did.
— Via JOHO The BLOG

Full disclosure: I've been a hard-core phenomenologist since my undergrad days, when I received dharma transmission in the lineage of C.I. Lewis.