There are flaws with a purely "objective" press as well as a purely partisan press.
Objective mainstream journalism relies upon the government institutions and other official government sources -- but the two-party system has a virtually monopoly on the spectrum of debate.
Partisan journalists allows their political biases to disproportionately present a set of facts so that their position will win the argument every time.
Integral Journalism is a new paradigm that could potentially provide the framework to integrate objective facts with a set of possible subjective interpretations of those facts (i.e. competing partisan, non-partisan and transpartisan hypotheses).
Could this concept of Integral Journalism overcome the Democratic and Republican power of how public policy issues are framed and discussed within the media?
ISSUE FRAMING DURING POLITICAL CONCENSUS
COMBINING OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY
INTEGRAL JOURNALSIM VS NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS
ISSUE FRAMING DURING POLITICAL CONCENSUS
Traditional journalism relies mostly on objective facts and subjective partisan perspectives from official government sources. One problem is that both Democrats and Republicans have a partisan bias that revolves around protecting their individual and collective political positions of power.
Another problem is that when the Democratic and Republican leadership agrees on an issue, then the "He Said / She Said" objectivity Gold Standard makes it is very difficult for the media to cover an issue.
The media are forced to search out other on-the-record institutional sources -- or more often unnamed anonymous bureaucratic sources. They also attempt to incorporate perspectives from partisan think tanks or government watchdog groups.
However, in the 30-weeks leading up to the military intervention in Iraq, the media trapped itself into uncritically echoing the daily framing and talking points that were released as a part of the White House's Public Relations Campaign to sell the war in Iraq.
COMBINING OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY
How is the best way to break this reliance on official sources without having to go back to a purely partisan and biased press?
The concept of "Integral Journalism" could provide some solutions.
Integral Journalism could balance objective facts with subjective perceptions by gathering a number of different expert perspectives, and then attempting to determine the common ground and points of departure between the different points of view.
Isolating these points of departure would allow an Integral Journalist to discover the differing assumptions that are causing the differing points of view. By making these assumptions more transparent, then the journalist could provide the audience with enough information to further investigate which assumptions they agree or disagree with.
If one or both of the assumptions can be disproved with a set of objective facts, then the journalist could present those facts either within the journalistic piece or within a set of footnotes located on a supplementary website.
The paradigm of Integral Journalism could provide the framework that would mandate that journalists to adhere to the high standards of objective news reporting while at the same time permitting the journalist to subjectively adjudicate the facts when they see fit.
But this journalistic adjudication process should also have a certain amount of transparency by using principles of open-source content development. As much of the source material that the journalist uses to come to their judgment should be made available online so that the audience can investigate and create their own meaning (More on the logistics of this can be found at Democratize the Media).
Integral Journalism would bring more transparency to the decision-making process of the newsmaking process but also within the policy-making process of the government. Transparency would be the key component of integrating the best aspects of objective journalistic standards with the insights from editorial subjective judgments.
INTEGRAL JOURNALSIM VS NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS
Some would argue that newspaper editorials already attempt to adjudicate the facts. But newspaper editorials also don't usually seek out a large number of expert perspectives on a given topic, and then sift through these perspectives in a comprehensive way.
They also don't usually illuminate the differences within the different partisan assumptions or very often challenge the framing of issues when the Democrats or Republicans agree.
The range of framing options for a public policy issue are still mostly set by the Democratic or Republican Party. Sometimes both perspectives can be right or both can be wrong -- or most often both perspectives are half-right and half-wrong.
An Integral Journalist could introduce competing hypothesis that could provide alternative explanations for current affair events when the Democrats and Republicans happen to agree. (See Steps #2, 3 and 4 in Democratize the Media.) These hypotheses could come from non-governmental organizations and have a non-partisan or transpartisan perspective.
Newspaper editorials already attempt to conduct a non-partisan adjudication of the facts, but they do not break into the transpartisan realm very often. They also do not incorporate the principles of transparency or open-source content development.
(NOTE: These are some brainstroming thoughts that resulted from writing an e-mail I sent off to someone affiliated with Integral Politics.)