“Media objectivity” is becoming obsolete. That may seem like a fairly extreme concept but all one has to do is examine the trends in modern broadcast and print journalism to realize that the term “objectivity” applies just as loosely to American media as the term “democracy” applies to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

From the renegade Lou Dobbs to the crusading op-ed staff of the New York Times, to the entire Fox News network, partisan critics have been screaming themselves hoarse about the extent to which other media outlets are biased. We hear about the “liberal wackos” running the newspapers from the right and the “right-wing nut jobs” infiltrating our televisions from the left. Everyone seems to think that the other guy is too biased to do good reporting. What’s more, everyone tries to pretend like his/her own program is objective.

But the public is smart, and according to John Zogby’s The Way We’ll Be, the youngest adults in the U.S. have very accurate “bullshit detectors”; we demand that the politicians be their real selves and the pundits take a chill pill. We know that every news outlet has its bias and we are ready for the media to be up front with us.

Rather than hiding behind a transparent veil of objectivity, media outlets are going to have to own up to their biases in addition to reporting to succeed with this generation. “In newsrooms, they know that their new readership wants to pick and choose it sown stories, interact with news reporters to get more details, communicate with others to get more meaning (or express more outrage), and ultimately make informed decisions,” writes Zogby.

Of course blogs and other subjective news sources could not survive without the bare bones of information provided by traditional media reporting, but this is actually perfect for old media to win in the end.

In a world of Facebook, Twitter, and millions of blogs, what we’re caring about more and more is not the story itself which can be obtained through various outlets, but rather who is telling it and why. Can we relate to the writer? Does the reporter believe in what he’s talking about? What is the photographer trying to tell us?

One of my professors at the University of Rochester once criticized a midterm I wrote by saying that I had a good narrative grasp of the topic, that I told the story, but that I lacked opinion. He could have gotten the story anywhere, and since it was his class he already knew it anyway, but what he cared about was my version, my bias.

Balanced, depersonalized reporting was paramount fifty years ago when we lacked the most basic information about events in far off countries. But the internet has placed all the facts about world events at our fingertips. We can know body counts, election results (official and oppositional), demographic details, and cultural particularities of any event or region in a few clicks.

What we need now is an opinion from the observer and some quality writing. We need to know how the heat of an explosion in Iraq feels on our skin, how tear gas stings our eyes in China, the smell of a thousand tulips in the Netherlands, and what it felt like to return home after witnessing all of this. Indeed, traditional media sources need to get back to what they do well writes Zogby, “providing the deep texture of the unfolding story and capturing the sense and feel of the community they serve.” He went on to quote Garrison Keillor that “‘they need to get back to the streets and talk about the things people actually talk about.’”

This need for an insider’s perspective, biases and all, was the reason young people (and eventually the media itself) flocked to Twitter in light of the latest Iranian conflicts. The story was common knowledge, and reporters did not have much access to the area, but what mattered were the individual perspectives. No one was claiming objectivity nor did anyone really need it. Thousands of people became reporters of their own stories, and the result? Unprecedented insight into a situation blocked off from the world’s most “objective” eyes.

Sure, one can worry that abandoning traditional “objective” reporting will cause and all-out descent into partisan rhetoric hell, but an alternative vision presents a world full of reporters telling their own stories who do a better job of covering 360 degrees of any event than Anderson Cooper.

We’re no longer looking to find the story, but are more and more tuned to whose story we’re reading or watching. There’s no point in hiding it, every news source and reporter can speak for their own eyes and ears and the world may not reveal the same mysteries to American eyes and to Brazilian eyes, nor will CNN’s eyes see the same thing as a French student’s eyes will notice and understand. We finally have access to all the eyes and ears we want, and instead of lecturing us that their eyes and ears are the only ones worth listening to, the traditional media needs to try to honestly talk to us so we can take their subjective perspective seriously.

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