Other articles by Sarah Garrecht Gassen:

Tucson's Bluepoint is pricey but well worth it How to keep kids on track in school 1st assignments for TUSD boss What's your water footprint? Food bank struggles to meet growing need (with slide show) UA-area restaurant offers something for everyone Preview: Veg-friendly Garland Bistro in time-warp — a tasty one Seafood shines at Hacienda del Mar Sushi Ten's once-great food, service have slippedTucson's on right track in treating mental illness

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Every journalism student is taught, explicitly or implicitly, that objectivity is a primary objective in journalism. Make sure you have both sides of the story; take yourself out of the reporting and writing — just the objective facts, ma'am. The public has been sold the same notion.

True objectivity is impossible in reporting and journalists should not aim for the notion of "objectivity" as it's understood today.

Accurate, fair and thorough — absolutely. Objective? Impossible.

The myth of "objectivity" is being used by the McCain campaign to slam the press for its investigation of his vice presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. McCain's advisers — and Palin herself in her convention speech — criticize the press for looking into the background, actions, statements and questions about a person much of the country knew nothing about until she became McCain's VP selection.

These criticisms from Republicans are ludicrous, but not unexpected. The press is doing what it is supposed to do — tell the American people more about who Palin is by examining what she has done in office, talking to people who know her and have worked with her, looking into statements she's made and organizations she's belonged to. Palin could conceivably become president.

The McCain camp should not have expected the American public to be mollified with knowing only the information it wanted us to know. The public must know everything possible about a person who could be president.

Because we collectively misunderstand the concept of journalistic objectivity, the McCain campaign is counting on duping voters into thinking that news stories that contain information not flattering to Palin must be biased and must be the product of a vicious press attack.

We believe that the public is smarter than to fall for that tired line.

"The claim that the media are against the Republican has been a good red meat applause line since 1964," said Tom Rosenstiel of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. "It's an article of faith. It predictably gains sympathy for Sarah Palin among the delegates — delegates, who might have been wondering how qualified she is or isn't, are more likely to be more sympathetic to her when the charge of media unfairness is made.

"Charging media bias for coverage was at least in part tactical," he said. "Not so much to put the press on the defensive, it succeeded in energizing delegates who believe the press is biased against them ideologically."

How news stories are viewed isn't objective. Humans don't receive information like computers, absorbing data with no response. But a story that contains information you consider negative about a political candidate is not automatically an attack, nor is one that is positive necessarily propaganda. Neutrality is impossible.

The best a journalist can do is to make sure his or her reporting is as complete as possible, ensure that the information presented is accurate and acknowledge what isn't known about a particular story.

Objectivity as we understand the concept in relation to journalism today isn't the ideal we should be striving for, according to Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach, journalists and authors of the book, "The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect."

Objectivity started as a quest for a thorough journalistic process, not an outcome. Kovach and Rosenstiel describe the changes journalism was undergoing at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, as newspapers became less entangled with partisan efforts and an emphasis on accuracy emerged.

In the late 19th century, journalists followed an approach they called "realism."

"This was the idea that if reporters simply dug out the facts and ordered them together, truth would reveal itself rather naturally," Kovach and Rosenstiel write. But by the early 20th century, the rise of propaganda, the attempts to influence and spin the press were being recognized for what they were, and the intellectuals and artists of the day were exploring human subjectivity.

The search for a way to inoculate journalism against such efforts and personal biases began. And with it evolved the notion that there should be a more concrete way of doing journalism — objective methods that would ensure that facts had been verified, that personal prejudices of the reporter had been accounted for, that what was presented as true lived up to the label.

So it was the process of how facts are gathered and assembled for readers that should be objective, kind of a scientific method for journalism.

Walter Lippmann, a leading journalist of the time, said that journalists needed "the scientific spirit . . . There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than aim; the unity of disciplined experiment."

Objectivity was supposed to be the means, not the ends. It's the process of comprehensively gathering facts, interviewing sources, putting the pieces together, questioning our own assumptions.

In an effort to help the public understand why journalists do what they do, we need to do a better job of explaining why we did this story and not that one, how we do reporting, who we talk to and why, how we check out a rumor, and what we talk about before running a story.

"We're way beyond letting the story speak for itself," Rosenstiel said in an interview Thursday. "We're well past the era of trust-me journalism, we're in the era of show-me journalism — show me why I should believe it."

My opinion