Following upon the comment that "objectivity" may be somehwat "thrown out" in today's journalism: I would agree if we are talking about journalism departments, schools or scholars, but it seems to me to be much alive among workining journalists, readers/viewers and the business folk who do much of the hiring. I agree with your comment about context. Sometimes it can be taken for granted that the contexts for viewers/readers/listeners will be fairly similar and per- haps not far rempoved from the context of the teller and those about whom the story is told. Other times the gap is very great. The greater the gap the more conscious the journalist becomes of it and the more the question of "whose context" is to dominate (or how different contexts are to be acknow- ledged) demands an answer. I'd like also to see the gap recognized when it is relatively small and does not demand recognition, as well as when it is large. I tend to see the journalist/etc. as taking the context of the receiver into account in order to acquaint the receiver with the different context of the subject. I may be a bit awkward in expressing this, because I have been trying to look at the whole problem from a little different perspective recently than I did when I was a working journlalist. I have been thinking about the implications about beginning with the ethical question of how one can best serve one's audience AND subject without turning either of them into MEANS TO AN END. I am adopting Fromm's concept of ethics here (which is why I wrote earlier of a "humanistic" journalism). To me a humanistic journalism would avoid reducing audiences to "markets" and subjects to sort of interchangeable parts that are constructed in some predetermined way (often sanctioned by the term "professionalism", badly defined too often as the skillful application of a formula to produce a predictable and dependable product). I think those who make documentary film have probably done more along the lines I am advocating to redefine journalism than has been done in daily practice, especially in radio and TV, where most of what I hear and see seems formulaic and where practitioners seem more likely to wave the banner of objectivity. This may sound picky, but rather than redefining journalism, I'd like to start with defining the position of the journalist vis a vis subject and audience within a humanistic ethical framework. The question of what journalism is comes next. What it is then can be defined in terms of what one expects it to do.