A fragment of Vita’s centerfold. (Tuncay Esref)

In her last days as a University of Chicago student, fourth-year Jackie Todd hopes to revive “Vita Excolatur,” the sex publication made by and for students that contains questionably pornographic material. Taking its name from the University’s motto, the magazine attempts to show “the life enriched” by sexuality. Although “Vita” has been short of writers, photographers, models, and a leadership structure since the magazine last made it to print in 2007, Todd has a strong interest in carrying out the project she inherited after her first year at the College. Many have expressed interest in “Vita” since then, but Todd says the problem has been students’ fears of commitment. Getting people to lay bare their bodies and thoughts about sex has proven difficult, even in a periodical that anticipates selling only 200 printed copies and will not be posted online, and editors have received last-minute requests to use pseudonyms or pull nude portraits. Contributors to the magazine cite anxiety of potential discovery by future employers or law school admissions officers as reasons for their preference for anonymity. Todd, calling herself the “Vita girl,” does not share this anxiety, stating plainly, “This is the bed I made for myself.”

UofC second-year and photographer Edward Menéndez, the only other actually named Vita contributor, is proud of the work he has submitted, although it was not shot for the magazine specifically. Like many UofC students, Menéndez is interested in questioning sex and gender roles, and believes “Vita” would be the appropriate venue. In this upcoming issue, he poses one female model in such a way that “it’s hard to draw sex out of the image.” A black-and-white side profile of a girl staring into a window located outside of the frame, the light spilling onto her slightly slumped shoulders, offers to its viewers no suggestions that are explicitly sexual. And yet by virtue of the fact that she is a naked woman, he admits that her image is sexualized. Menéndez prefers to inspire reflection rather than hand viewers any definite assignment or conclusions. “It’s a provocation, be it sexual, physical, psychological.”

As a rule, Todd would not ask “Vita” contributors to do something that she herself would not feel comfortable doing, which includes shots of penetration or masturbation. For her, a spread that involved any live sex act would be “crossing a line I’m not comfortable with,” adding, “There are some things you don’t get to see.” Though Todd’s boundaries may have influenced the direction of this last issue, her bold direction sets the bar high for issues to come, as she will be posing for “Vita”’s staple photo of “hot chicks reading books.” Said one of the magazine’s photographers, Tuncay Esref, “People are scared of other people’s judgments, which I think is why ‘Vita’ is necessary.” Esref hopes to find a future venue for “a shoot that involved sweat and bulges of skin and pubic hair.” With Todd graduating in just a few short days, her hope to “bring sex to a more public arena,” beginning with her own full exposure, is the first step to reclaiming the world of academic erotica. And with students like Esref and Menéndez sticking around, “Vita Excolatur” will live on as the counterpart to this crescat scientia institution.
“Vita” will be printed and ready for sale by the start of the second week in June in the UofC Reynolds Club.

(courtesy of Taylor Mallory)

“Why not put food and entertainment all under one bun?” Taylor Mallory asks, reciting the slogan of his new food and music webshow, “Music Burger.” Wearing a smart sport jacket and his signature black baseball cap backwards, Mallory doesn’t look stressed, but the musician and teacher has a lot on his plate.

Having just graduated from Columbia College, he teaches an after-school class in music production at a South Side high school, works at a music production company, entertains at corporate events, is a wedding singer, and produces “Music Burger” episodes each week. The webshow was a “spontaneous creative idea” that came to Mallory as a way to promote Chicago musicians and bring people to his personal website through a food and music web series. Episodes of the show include a performance by a musical guest and Mallory teaching one simple recipe. The guests and the food are always related: Mallory says, “You think of going out to a nice restaurant and you think of a specific kind of music, like classical music, and then for a barbecue maybe you think of soul, or folk music.” He tries to do the same thing with “Music Burger”—in the most recent episode Mallory invited in an action-packed band, ENDISKIZE, and taught viewers how to make a protein shake. The project was originally entitled “I like food and people,” but that name was scrapped. Mallory explains why, leaning back in his chair, looking spaced out, and saying slowly, “I didn’t want to sound like a hippie.”

Three other Columbia College students work with Mallory on “Music Burger,” and the end result of their collaboration is near-professional quality web episodes. Additional help and advice comes from Ivan Dupee of Dupee Productions, whom Mallory describes simply as “a blessing.” The group is hoping the project will lead to distribution on major channels in the future, which would allow them to expand to other cities and provide exposure for even more artists. For now, musicians featured on “Music Burger” have come from the South and West Sides of Chicago, as well as the suburbs.

While “Music Burger” is a lot of work, Mallory says it all comes together in moments like the one in the J Gridges episode, when he was standing in his kitchen and watching the band play and felt “this can really be something.” He loves to see the musicians he features talking up “Music Burger” on their own sites, and is proud to say that the project surprises people he meets. The drive behind his work comes from his conviction that the music industry lacks creativity, and he wants to push forward the “craft” of making music. And there’s another reason. “If it puts a smile on your face, then do it,” Mallory says.

The same belief that people should pursue what they enjoy runs through Mallory’s class in music production at Hirsch Metropolitan High School in Grand Crossing, the neighborhood just south of Woodlawn. He calls his teaching “organic,” responding to his own and students’ interests. Mallory moves on quickly from talking about this job, adding that he works in client relations for Dupee Productions and has various weekend gigs. He chuckles and says, “I know you’re thinking, ‘That’s a lot.’”

But Mallory never misses a beat, even asking for a publicity shot of himself with your reporter to hype this article. “Music Burger” has been picked up by Blip TV, a resource for video bloggers, and with Mallory at the helm more publicity is inevitable.

“Voices of the Middle Eastern City” was performed on May 14th at the University of Chicago as part of the 25th annual Middle Eastern History and Theory Conference. The symposium attracted scholars from such varied institutions as the University of Melbourne, Columbia University, and Turkey’s Bilkent University. The assembly hall of the International House was filled with these intellectuals and others who chose to spend last Friday evening listening to the sounds of the Middle East.

The University of Chicago’s Middle East Music Ensemble took the stage next, parading their collection of bendirs, ouds, and santours alongside violins, recorders, and clarinets. Students, professors, and others jubilantly strummed and hammered and bowed away at their respective instruments. Men got up one by one to sing as the performance moved through classical Arabian songs, old Iranian folk tunes, and Andalusian poetry put to music.

From the outset, “Voices of the Middle Eastern City” spoke to the plurality of the word “voices.” Throughout the performance reverberated echoes of Jewish, Persian, Turkish, and Sufi traditions, to name a few. With each bedtime tale read aloud, each personal thought jotted down in a journal 200 years ago that was again invoked on stage, each folk tune being sung for the umpteenth time, the understanding deepened: there is no singular Middle Eastern perspective.

Howe is best known for her politically and religiously charged poetry (though she has also published a few novels and is currently working on children’s books), but the UofC students and faculty that attended her lecture and discussion on Friday were more interested in Howe’s idea of “itinerant” poetry. Before reading each of her poems, Howe told the audience where it was written, the places ranging from Ireland to Russia, from California to her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she and her sister Susan Howe, also a poet, grew up. She was inspired to write by Celtic and Chinese poetry, and this is reflected in the dense yet terse character of her writing. Most of the poems she read produced a tension between humor and seriousness, and between mass experience and the individual mind. They are packed with allusions such as “predatory purgatory,” but are rarely erudite. The poet also put down her book for a while to screen a fifteen-minute video after her lecture in which she narrated a bleak, black-and-white animation created by her son.

But Howe’s work, though stark, is not usually so pessimistic; it is often humorous, and frequently provoked nervous laughter in the audience. Many in attendance seemed almost unnerved by the informality and calmness of such a famous poet. Howe claims not to care whether or not anyone reads her poetry, and her ambivalence towards her readership fits well with her independent demeanor: “The life of a poet,” Howe said, is “a life outside the law.”

Mark Strand (Claire Hungerford)

When did poetry begin to mean something to you?

Well, it’s hard to say. The question implies that there’s a narrative—a beginning, a middle, a conclusion. But poetry, I guess, first meant something to me when my mother read to me as a child. But to what degree poetry then meant anything to me—it was really my mother’s voice reading to me more than the poems.

Do you think it’s important for poets to read other poets?

Of course. Otherwise, you’re an ignoramus in the very field that you’ve chosen for yourself. Every poet should have read the classics. They should know something about rhyme and meter; it’s part of your endowment, your craft. Think of a physicist who didn’t know anything about Newton, or didn’t know basic arithmetic or math.

People have this feeling that poetry just pours out of a little wizened part somewhere and it’s the most valuable thing in the world because it was written by me, wonderful me. It’s become a technique for self-validation. It strikes me as a sign of an impoverished psyche.

Do you think that poetry is conceived of differently now than it was when you began working?

Well, I think that it’s become so intellectualized that nobody is really reading poems that they enjoy reading; they’re just trying to figure them out. People are inventing tricks by which they can write poetry. I think poetry is more playful. I think the kick in writing is making stuff up, not playing off of other poems. Imagining, from square one. See what you can do with a blank page instead of taking somebody else’s page or doing this or that to them. I just think that’s bullshit.

You know, there’s a certain kind of poetry that English departments favor, this kind of intellectualized thing. But also, English departments are full of Marxists, which the rest of the world has found doesn’t work. Only in English departments this is valuable. In Eastern Europe, you can’t find any Marxists. I don’t get it.

Do you have a different editor for prose than you do for poetry?

No. I have my editor of the moment at Knopf. But my agent, who’s at a powerful agency, will say, if they’re not going to offer us the kind of money we want, we’re moving. I explained this to my editor. She said, yeah, I know, but I want to work with you.

How much do you work with your editor word by word on your writing?

Never. I mean, a book like this prose book I’m working on, I will go over conceptual matters with her—this needs more filling out, or do this, you should do more of what you did here—but as far as poetry goes, nothing ever is changed. A bit of punctuation, maybe. But when I wrote a book of stories, half of them had been in the New Yorker, so they were all thoroughly edited there, so the Knopf editor didn’t have much to do. I mean, it’ll be edited, because I do make mistakes. Rarely [laughs]. I mean, I believe in good spelling. I believe in punctuation.

I’m thinking of something that Elisabeth Sifton [an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux] wrote about editing Saul Bellow. She talked about going through Bellow’s work with him word by word, line by line, and this incredibly dependent relationship Bellow had with her.

I don’t think that would happen today. That’s a huge investment of money and time. I mean, editors have to be more productive. I would love it if they did that. It would be like having your back scratched.

(courtesy of Carrie Splitler)

Meeting every Tuesday evening at the King Public Library in Bronzeville, the group is organized by the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, a nonprofit based in Hyde Park. Since 1996, the NWA has held free writing workshops across Chicago, focusing, according to current Executive Director Carrie Spitler, on “areas where there are few opportunities for adults to engage in hands-on artmaking.” It also publishes writing from these workshops in a quarterly magazine, the Journal of Ordinary Thought, which bears the motto, “Every person is a philosopher.” JOT was founded in 1991 by Hal Adams, then a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It began as an outlet for the writing produced by parents at Chicago public schools, but expanded in 1996 when Adams recruited Deborah Epstein and Sunny Fischer to start the NWA with aid from federal grants. Currently, the organization operates between ten to fourteen regular workshops on the South and North sides of the city, but the exact number often changes due to fluctuations in funding. It is run by two to three full time staff members, with the help of volunteer workshop leaders and proofreaders, and a board of directors who bring diverse expertise to the table.

Though the written word brings NWA’s philosophers to the table, teaching is not the organization’s only goal. The workshop leaders introduce writers to different kinds of verse and provide criticism, but according to Jeanette Jordan, who has frequented sessions at the King Library since 2006, “There’s no attendance taken. You don’t have to do homework. You don’t have to do anything. You come and you enjoy each other. Everybody writes differently, and that’s wonderful.” Says Lindsay, an MFA student at Chicago State University and the author of several books, “I come to pass on what I have and also to get the input and the conversation. So it’s a table of equals. Even though I may be the person who may have the more literary skills in terms of information—and that’s very questionable—there are other things I pick up. It’s opened my mind a lot.”

In addition to providing literary lessons, the NWA aims to open minds and dialogues, to build connections between its writers, as well as between individual lives and larger social questions. JOT serves as evidence, says Spitler, that “people can narrate their own story, can be in control of how their own experience is portrayed, can be involved in civic engagement and push for political change.” The workshops are not only a space to write, but also a space for writers to discuss issues that impact their daily lives. A recent issue of JOT devoted to transportation provoked discussions about the Chicago Transit Authority’s budget cuts. Writers are currently being encouraged to think about environmental issues for a future edition of the journal.

The workshops are also perpetuated by this kind of grassroots communication. Jordan tells the story of her own induction into the King Library writers’ circle: “On my journey to work every morning, I would meet this lady, and we would say, ‘Good morning,’ ‘Good evening,’ ‘Have a good weekend,’ that sort of thing. But we never knew each other’s names or anything.” One day, they struck up a deeper conversation, and Jordan learned that this familiar stranger was a published writer who frequented the King Library workshops. “She said, ‘Why don’t you come?’ I said sure. I loved to write, but I really didn’t have structure until this man came into my writing spirit,” she says, gesturing towards Lindsay. “I have writing friends of all ages, sexes, and everything. We share our words, and our inner spirits, and it’s wonderful.”

Of course, one of JOT’s biggest audiences is the writing family that produces it. “We want them to see their work published,” says Spitler, “and they take a lot of pride in seeing their writing in print.” But through JOT, the NWA also hopes to bring an understanding of its writers’ daily lives to a wider public. “In the same way we want to start conversations in our workshops, we’re hoping something in the journals will strike people and start a conversation.” She adds that the organization hopes that readers will “see the creative capital of neighborhoods that might be outside their experience, or that they only read about in newspapers.” Copies of JOT are sent out to various policymakers, with the hopes of, in Spitler’s words, helping them “find out what’s on the minds of their constituents.” She notes, however, that the NWA has received “very little” response from politicians.

Though many of JOT’s writers have stuck with their workshops for years, the NWA looks forward to bringing in new faces and broadening its mission. The workshops record each writer’s name, address, gender, ethnicity, and other information at the beginning of each meeting, and according to Spitler, “the demographics have changed over the last few years. For a time, we had 75 to 80 percent women, mostly older and African-American.” But the workshops have managed to bring in a greater Latino population, and, with the introduction of the St. Leonard House branch, based at the halfway house for released prisoners, an increase in the male population. The NWA also hopes to expand into the online world in the near future, in order to spread its message further and to encourage tech literacy. And of course, each new issue of the Journal of Ordinary Thought brings new writers to touch on new subject matter.

On Wednesday, the evening after the King branch’s meeting, the latest edition of JOT is unveiled to an audience packed into the Harold Washington Library’s Author’s Room. Based on a classic writing prompt, this issue’s theme, “Where I’m From,” asked writers to explore their cultural, spiritual, and geographic origins. The event brings writers from different branches together, offering them a chance to share words and experiences. Jeanette Jordan moderates the reading, opening with the poem “What Is,” specially written for the event. The release of this issue of JOT has special importance for Jordan. Not only are two of her pieces included in the new issue, but it also takes its title, “Whistle Talk,” from a piece by one of her fellow writers at King Library, Phyllis Roker. At the end of the two-hour marathon session of thirty readings, the room erupts into applause, then cools into a crowd of congratulatory hugs and book-signings. The library closes and everyone is shuffled home, but as the evening’s first poem “What Is” had predicted, “The words bloom like flowers/Each having fragrances for hours.”

Check back in a few days to see a short film of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance reading, produced by the Chicago Weekly.

Sitting on a small stage in the Experimental Station across from Chicago Public Radio host Steve Edwards, Michelle Alexander described the systematic discrimination against racial minorities by the United States’ criminal justice system. Author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Alexander explained that the supposedly colorblind narcotics laws that came out of the War on Drugs specifically target people of color, especially young black men. This has led to mass incarceration of minorities, many of whom are stripped of their legal rights upon release. In the ’70s, before drug legislation was implemented, there were around 300,000 people incarcerated in America. Now there are over two million people in American prisons, Alexander said, and it’s not an accident that most of them are black.

What if, Alexander asked us to consider, the police treated drug use in college fraternities like they do in poor minority communities? What if they entered parties, lawfully seized the personal property of the offenders, sent 18-year-old University of Chicago students to jail for years, and stripped them of legal rights when they got out? A murmur rose up among us.

This discrimination is real, said Alexander, but it is not simple to explain. There are more black officers on police forces now than ever before, she pointed out to us, and there are more black men in prison now than ever before. She told us that she herself, an African-American civil rights lawyer born a generation after Jim Crow was dismantled, still finds her perceptions colored by racial biases.

“Martin Luther King, Jr. used to say over and over again in his speeches that racial caste systems are supported more by racial indifference than racial hostility,” Alexander reminded us. “The same thing can be said about mass incarceration. We don’t care enough as a nation about black and brown youth, and if we did, the system of mass incarceration would not exist.”

When the discussion ended, many listeners lingered. We passed out fliers, we exchanged numbers, we filled the space with conversation. We left that small crowded room slowly, because we felt connected, and we did not want to be indifferent.

Clare Feinberg contributed reporting to this article.

Bernstein read to a large audience on Sunday, February 14, at a reading sponsored by the Renaissance Society. He was in Chicago for the opening of his daughter Emma Bee Bernstein’s show “Masquerade: A Retrospective,” which runs until February 27 at DOVA Temporary. (Emma was a graduate of the University of Chicago; she died in 2008.) At the reading, Bernstein read selections from his forthcoming selected poems, “All the Whiskey in Heaven”; translations; a poem of Louis Zukofsky’s in a deep New York Jewish accent; an essay by Emma from her book “Girldrive,” which was published in October; and recent poems, including a moving series dedicated to Emma.

“I think of poetry as a fundamental activity within our culture, marginal though it is—as a historical, cognitive, philosophical, aesthetic project that can do an enormous amount in terms of reflecting on the culture we’re in,” Bernstein said. At times in his career Bernstein has been seen as an antagonistic figure, criticizing “official verse culture” and events like National Poetry Month; in our interview, he took a more conciliatory tone. “I always find it amusing in the agonism over poetry that the refusal to be dogmatic and to have principles is routinely described as dogmatic and intolerant but the only thing that seems to be tolerant is absolute intolerance: which is neoliberalism at its heart.”

“Poetry allows us to work out and to think through conflicts and agonisms in a space that isn’t directly involved with macropolitics,” Bernstein said. “One of the roles that poetry can have is to question the nature of how language is used to normalize, to regulate, to suppress expression.” At the reading on Sunday, there was plenty of laughter expressed in the room. In Bernstein’s work, the serious ambitions of poetry are conveyed with plenty of irreverence and humor. “For me poetry is a form of sophism and of rhetoric rather than of truth and sincerity.”

Armantrout’s most recent book, “Versed,” is her tenth. Her poems are short lyrics that probe human consciousness and the various influences that penetrate it: “the impersonal abjection of being finite, of being created, not self-created,” she said at a lunchtime lecture on the 22nd. Armantrout uses found language from contexts that are typically recognizable to readers, if typically untraditional in poems. One quotes a telephone bill: “These temporary credits/will no longer be reflected/in your next billing period.” Armantrout said that she found that little note “somewhat ominous…Is this our modern version of ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may?’ I guess I wanted the reader to hear that, too.” Other poems draw from overheard conversation, the newspaper, popular songs, or books about physics and neuroscience. “Generally, wherever they come from, these pieces are things that make me say ‘huh?’ or ‘WTF?’”

Armantrout is known as a Language poet, a term which describes a loose grouping of writers with similar politics and aesthetics who came together in the Bay Area and New York in the 1970s. The Language poets, Armantrout said, “allowed for a kind of space between sentences or between statements, between stanzas, spaces for uncertainty, where the connections between what came last and what comes next are problematized and open to reader interpretation.” “Versed” was named this weekend as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Award in 2009.

Her new manuscript is called “Money Shot”—she joked at the reading that the audience must be polite if it wasn’t giggling at the porn reference. The title poem refers to the banking crisis and the atmosphere of acquisition and attainment. “The money shot of porn, as we all know, is when it becomes obvious that the man has ejaculated,” Armantrout said. “In more general terms, the money shot is where something is revealed.”

See the Chicago Weekly’s blog for the full interview with Rae Armantrout.

Learning to See Through the Eyes of the Emperor
by Toby O’Ryan, RCP
U.S. journalism trains people to see through the eyes of empire. Imperial interests guide the premises and assumptions of each article and TV segment, from the problems it poses to the conclusions it draws.

Look, for instance, at the role of the press during the buildup to war against Iraq—a war, let us not forget, which has almost certainly taken the lives of over one million people. The entire press parroted every empty claim about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction—with the New York Times outdoing them all with “investigative reporting” from Judith Miller that turned out to be utterly bogus. The few people who did get on TV to raise a question about these claims were pilloried (e.g., Paula Zahn, “objective commentator” on CNN, saying that the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who disputed the egregiously false claims made by the Bush Administration, had “drunk Saddam Hussein’s Kool-Aid”). And every mainstream journalist understood that any deviation would be met by effective professional death (e.g., Dan Rather, former CBS News anchor, in an unguarded moment on BBC in June of 2002, compared his situation to the time in the South African upsurge when, in Rather’s words, “people would put flaming tires around people’s necks… In some ways, the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have the flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck…”).

But it goes beyond the lying and intimidation. The little dissent allowed into the mainstream media must be framed in terms of “what is good for America.” In this way, the terms of debate and mode of presentation train people to think as mini-emperors. “What are we going to do in Iraq?” And today: “How can we best defend American interests in Afghanistan?” That “we” masks a fundamental conflict between those in whose interests these wars are really fought and the vast majority of humanity—including, yes, the vast majority of people who live in the U.S., however they may perceive their interests at any given time.

On this foundation, the entire range of political thinking, and hence action, becomes straitjacketed and suffocated. As Revolutionary Communist Party, USA chairman Bob Avakian pointed out in a recent talk, “Unresolved Contradictions, Driving Forces for Revolution,” every item in the news is presented not in terms of what is true and what are the larger implications, “but ‘what do the Democrats say, what do the Republicans say?’ Over and over again, through ‘mainstream’ ruling class media, such as CNN, the idea is propagated and reinforced that these are the only terms on which things can even be considered politically—Republicans vs. Democrats.”

Let me pose an alternative: a journalism and a political orientation that seeks the truth and strives to lay bare the systemic dynamics behind every outrage… one that shows the pathways to revolutionary change of that system, in the interests of humanity.

The problem of U.S. journalism? In a word, imperialism.

The solution? Seeking truth, making revolution.

American News vs. Reality
by Manuel Alex Moya, Objectivist Club

Consider the missions and mottos of some of the media organizations that are popular in our culture today:
• “All the News That’s Fit to Print” -New York Times
• “Inform, Involve and Empower” -CNN
• “Fair and Balanced” -Fox News
• “We recognize that a work force comprised of a wide variety of perspectives, viewpoints and backgrounds is integral to our continued success.” -CBS
Obviously a paper doesn’t have room to fit all the news in the world. So which events are more “fit” to be printed than others? On what basis does a news company consider its audience to be “informed”? What constitutes views that are “fair” and “balanced”? Fair to whom? Should equal consideration be given to any and every perspective?

The reigning doctrine in American media is clear. Most news agencies hold that there are “two sides” to every event, argument, or thought, and that both need to be reported. In these stated premises there is no objectively “right” or “wrong” viewpoint. Those news agencies that are popular today are those that are either: a) open to trumpeting any popular perspective, even those which are irrational, or b) closed to considering any perspective, even those which are rational.

However committed to nonpartisanship and ideological “tolerance” most news agencies may claim to be, they forget that this commitment is itself based on a theoretical premise—the theory of pragmatism. As a philosophy, pragmatism holds that there is no reality. If nothing is real, then how are we to look at truth? As the pragmatist philosopher, William James says, “‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” In other words, there are no objective truths, only that which works.

Imagine if a candidate for office ran his campaign advertising explicitly that he was an aspiring dictator. Imagine if such a candidate wanted to possess control over every aspect of life—the auto industry, banks, health care, etc.

If a reporter wanted to expose him for the fascist he is, he and his publication would be condemned for being “biased” or “one-sided.” Since our culture expects a pragmatic approach to “reality,” they would expect their news in the same light, where either: a) multiple views are passed, regardless of their validity, or b) no objective judgment is passed.

The fact of the matter is that we can never escape our “biases,” our means of integrating information, our philosophical premises. To claim that one is reporting a “truth” over a falsehood, means that one recognizes philosophically, that reality exists and that he is bringing into focus an aspect of it. It means that he recognizes that things cannot be true and untrue at the same time, since in reality, there are no contradictions. It means recognizing that reporting views that are “expedient” for range of the moment ratings, blind us to those views that are fundamentally true, always.