After reading their code of journalism (in dutch: http://www.nos.nl/assets/ombudsman/ombuds_jcode.html) I think, noble as they are might of meant to be, they are still interpretable and I am still playing with this objectivity issue.

My curiosity has to do with the notion that today even the most well established news broadcasters tend to personalize their stories to some degree to make them a bit more digestible to the bigger public. And I think with making news digestible comes colorization. In the end it is still about attracting viewers or readers. Also my curiosity has to do with the idea that from the same pool of information, multiple stories can be drawn, even when all the information pieces are authenticated. Meaning that when you create a story based upon a pool of information, the color of the story is determent by the way the information is put in context. I guess the more colorless the information itself is, the easier it is to use it in different contexts. Then, another curiosity, is the the availability of source material itself. A news program, a lot of times, is about the news of the day. Video material is of high communicative value, but the material has to be available. The closer to home, the easier to get. So, am I missing out on other perspectives that are harder to find? I don’t even know if there are big African new agencies who are contacted by western counterparts because somehow I always seem to miss the African perspective on matters. Or foreign ministers disagreeing on the Dutch perspective. So my question really is: can it be that objectivity only exists within a common accepted truth?

I do know that the world is growing increasingly complex and most people today are in search of some degree of simplicity; tools, coaches or channels which simplify the world a bit. In the abundance of choice and information, I’ll increasingly form my truth’s on other information than other people do. And I don’t think that inherently is a bad thing. But it does make me wonder what objectivity means. You cannot include all truth’s out there, certainly not in a news broadcast, and you don’t know what you don’t know. So many times I hear people reacting on news events and find myself thinking they don’t know half of it. Not to say that I am right, but to illustrate that my opinion is based on other information.
The need for simplifying matters will probably grow as people already suffer a overload of information and choice. But who do I trust to simplify the world for me?