I have a favor to ask – get up off your lazy butt, sit down and turn on the television to your favorite news channel. At any give point you’ll be inundated with flashy computer graphics swooping in from the corner of your screen to show you the importance of unbiased and objective reporting, conveniently administered through repetitive motions, simple words and colors.

“Fair and balanced.” “The place for politics.” “America’s news leader.”

These are the mantras under which our media conglomerates operate. However, when investigating something as mangled and lopsided as government affairs, is corporate news’ branded lubricant of objectivity what we really need to digest newsworthy events?

It’s no mystery that journalism has played a crucial part in America’s history. The journalist easily excels at fulfilling the first component of his duties – reporting news to the public. But even with the high value we place on objectivity, those words come with an influential twist.

For example, more than 50% of news coverage in 2003 on CBS, NBC, and FOX News painted the Iraq War as positive, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. In the late 1880s, yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst rallied the public to support a US war against Spain. Even as early as 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Lt. Colonel Carrington of the Continental Army, “…were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Regardless, a recently overlooked position of journalism has been that of government watchdog – cautiously skeptical and consistently questioning. In a September 2003 USA Today interview, former ABC World News anchor Peter Jennings remarked on such a duty: “This role [journalism] is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public.”

So, what stands in the journalist’s way from fulfilling the guardian role? The answer lies in our current definition of objectivity.

In a recent interview, Robert Jensen, an associate professor at the University’s School of Journalism, explained that there is a lot of confusion associated with objectivity. Armed with a Ph.D. in media ethics and law, Jensen said that objectivity includes a commitment to not fabricating information, approaching the world with an open mind and honestly presenting that information.

“However, that’s not what we have,” said Jensen.

Today’s objectivity, according to the Jensen, is “a cover for a set of practices tending to privilege the views of official sources that represent powerful institutions…rooted in economics – a cheap, easy and safe way to report.”

If journalists are committed to truth and accuracy in what they print and broadcast, they must also embrace the dwindling part of watchdog so they can fulfill their duties to, and on behalf of, the public. Instead, topical demand for an adulterated form of objectivity restricts the journalist, leading to reporter complacency, which finally results in our current situation of partisan hackery – political correctness for journalists.

Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, an organization that investigates propaganda and promotes media literacy, explained that reporter complacency is due to security. It’s safer for a journalist to simply present both sides and leave it at that.

“People are frustrated with media and feel that news reporting isn’t filling its role in society,” said Farsetta.

The disadvantage of representing both sides is that we lose the larger context in which events occur, a duty that falls within journalist’s role, according to Jensen, and a key requirement in holding those in power accountable.

“It’s the journalist’s responsibility to look at the big picture,” remarked Jensen. “Otherwise, you’re a stenographer, which is of no value.”

On a local level, when print media reported on the mandated tuition increases towards the end of the semester, journalists covered that event ‘objectively’ – who, what, when, where and why – allowing them to fulfill half of their responsibilities.

However, the university students dug deeper and looked to late June 2003, when tuition deregulation was passed under the guise of making higher education in Texas affordable to everyone, which is a false statement when presented with the fact that tuition has increased 93% over the past four years.

Which news organization held accountable those who were responsible for tuition deregulation? It was well within the scope of the journalist’s duty to ask university administrators why they were raising prices when tuition deregulation was supposed to keep costs down. And if it wasn’t keeping costs down, then why was it implemented?

On a national level, it means that when the US Congress votes to implement a federal identification system for every American under the Real ID Act, the journalist is well within his scope of authority to ask the members of Congress why they decided to infringe on privacy – a topic that may butt heads with the current administration but cannot be painted as a liberal or conservative bias. When the US Congress votes to deny habeas corpus under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, not in a time of rebellion or invasion, as stated in the Constitution, the journalist has a duty to ask why members of Congress suspended a constitutional right – again, neither a liberal nor a conservative topic.

When asked why he thought it was hard for politicians to answer a straight, simple question, Daily Show host Jon Stewart replied, during an October 2004 appearance on CNN’s Crossfire, “I don’t think it’s hard; I just think that nobody holds their feet to the fire to do it, so they don’t have to.”

The attempts at what is considered objectivity are nothing more than avoiding controversy and the equivalent of giving Republicans and Democrats equal airtime. While the false objectivity of covering, praising, and disparaging the two political parties equally barely fulfills the duty of news reporting, it distracts from the second duty of the journalist – holding public policymakers and politicians accountable.

But who am I to argue with both “the most trusted name in news” and “the most powerful name in news?”