In and Out, Wicak Hidayat

Ariana Huffington, pendiri blog politik Huffington Post, berkomentar begini dalam wawancaranya di Poynter:

A lot of the discontent with traditional journalism is because too many reporters have forgotten that the highest calling of journalists is to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned. 

Unfortunately, this is a concept that has fallen out of favor with too many journalists, who are obsessed with a false view of “balance” and “objectivity” and have become addicted not to the tireless pursuit of truth, but to the tireless promotion of the misguided notion that every story has two sides. And that the truth is supposed to be found somewhere in the middle. 

But not every story has two sides and the truth is often found on one side or the other. The earth is not flat. Evolution is a fact. Global warming is a fact. And there are definitely not two sides to the proposition that Iraq is our generation’s greatest foreign policy disaster. It is. Period.

HuffPost eschews the misleading “on the one hand, but on the other” approach to news because not every story has an “other hand.” Also, HuffPost doesn’t pretend not to have opinions, but it does make them transparent.

Seperti pernah saya katakan dalam sebuah diskusi bertahun-tahun yang lalu. Wartawan pasti berpihak, tinggal masalah mau berpihak pada siapa. Bagusnya sih kalau bisa berpihak pada kepentingan publik, kebenaran (nah, yang ini sulit banget didefinisikannya!) dan kaum tertindas.

Tercatat juga rekornya hari Sabtu kemaren. Dan inilah orang-orang dari detik yang ikut kerepotan mensukseskan acara itu:

Kok saya nggak ada di situ? Ah, saya kan cuma bikin pedoman ngeblog buat peserta sama nyusun guide pertanyaan buat Kang Onno ajukan ke Sarah Azhari & Nadine Chandrawinata. Tak perlulah ikut-ikut di foto.