The recent furor over NPR host Lisa Simeone’s involvement in a Washington-based offshoot of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests has drawn attention again to the issue of whether journalists should be allowed to have — and express — their opinions about social issues. Some believe that “transparency is the new objectivity,” in the words of author David Weinberger, and that this is appropriate in an age when the web allows for a multiplicity of voices. Former Slate media critic Jack Shafer also falls into this camp, and says the days of asking journalists to pretend that they are automatons without opinions should be coming to an end.

One of the most alarming aspects of Simeone’s case is that she isn’t a political reporter for NPR or even involved in anything political at the public-radio station in Washington she was freelancing for: she hosted a musical documentary program called Soundprint for WAMU, from which she has apparently been dismissed, and was also a host of another show called World of Opera for NPR. Why would NPR or any other public-radio affiliate care whether someone hosting a music program was involved in a social protest? Because the issue of journalists — of any kind, but especially the government-funded kind — having political opinions is still fraught with controversy.

Why shouldn’t journalists be able to express opinions?

There have been plenty of other cases that make this point as well: Last year, for example, CNN Senior Editor and Middle East expert Octavia Nasr was fired after more than two decades at the news channel because she posted a sympathetic comment about the death of an alleged terrorist leader to her Twitter account. As I wrote at the time, these kinds of events force media outlets to confront the myth that journalists are objective — and that reporters can’t have or express opinions about the topics they cover. If anything, I think news consumers would be better off if they expressed themselves more rather than less, so that everyone would know where they stand.

Former Slate media critic Jack Shafer, now a columnist for Reuters, said something similar during a live discussion about objectivity and journalism hosted by the Poynter Institute on Wednesday. As Shafer put it:

We’re kidding ourselves and kidding our readers when we pretend that journalists have no opinions and no biases. My view is that journalists can’t be objective, because as human beings we are all subjective. What we can do is employ an objective method in the reporting and writing of the news: To be fair, to be accurate, to be comprehensive. If a reporter pledges to do that, I have no problem with them having opinions.

Unfortunately, Shafer says, many editors remain “deeply invested in the idea that their reporters should walk through life like un-biased zombies,” which leads them to question everything from whether reporters should be fans of specific Facebook web pages to whether they should be allowed to express opinions on their Twitter accounts. These kinds of fears are what lead to the kind of soul-less — and also ultimately unenforceable — social-media policies that many media outlets come up with, which prevent their reporters and editors from engaging with readers in any way, including in the comments on their stories or in Twitter discussions about the topics they cover.

Readers can make their own judgments about bias

Shafer said that he was sure his new employer, like most established media entities, likely restricts the ability of its journalists to belong to political parties or express political opinions, but that he thinks this is wrong. But won’t readers be misled by the biases of the journalists they listen to or read? Shafer doesn’t think so:

I have great faith in the average person because I am one. I’m of normal height, normal IQ, I went to a school that once called itself Western Normal College. So, yes, I think average readers can calibrate for bias.

In some ways, Shafer seems to be advocating a position similar to one described by The Economist earlier this year, as part of a package about the evolution of journalism in an age where anyone can be a publisher and a reporter — thanks to what Om has called the “democracy of distribution” provided by blogs, social networks and tools like Twitter. As The Economist noted, the disruption of media has created an environment much like the early days of journalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of mass media forms like the newspaper or the radio program.

As Shafer said in the Poynter discussion, having reporters and other journalists disclose their views and opinions actually makes it easier for readers and listeners to determine whether they want to trust their reporting — and as David Weinberger noted in his post about transparency, the web allows for the inclusion of links and other features that make it easier for users to check facts and come to their own conclusions. Objectivity, he said, is “a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.” It’s time we allowed journalists to be human beings, both online and off.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Rosauro Ochoa and Yodel Anecdotal

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It’s never easy to shift from working as an independent creator to entering the employ of a multinational corporation — and it’s even tougher if you’ve made your name as an independent political pundit, one whose reputation was based on an ability to speak freely and fiercely. This week’s drama between The Young Turks creator and host Cenk Uygur and MSNBC, therefore, has a sad tinge of inevitability to it, with the major twist being just how loudly Uygur is raging against his former employer.

Since the creation of the Young Turks radio show in 2002, Uygur has been a vocal left-wing voice in political commentary, especially after coming to the online video world and becoming one of YouTube’s most prominent political commentary channels. That success lead him to appear as a commentator on numerous mainstream news programs, with Uygur eventually taking over the hosting of MSNBC Live.

However, this week it was announced that Uygur would not be returning to the show — for reasons Uygur and MSNBC can’t agree on, and been publicly in disputing about. That dispute has raged on from the New York Times  to Keith Olbermann’s new Current-based Countdown show to the Young Turks YouTube channel.

Uygur’s primary point of contention is that after six months of hosting MSNBC Live, and significantly improving the ratings (including beating CNN’s The Situation Room in the 18-34 year old demographic), he was brought in for a meeting with MSNBC president Phil Griffin. There he was told that he would no longer be hosting Live, and instead would be given a new contract that involved hosting a weekend show. That would have be considered a demotion, even though Uygur was reportedly offered double the paycheck, according to his report on YouTube. Instead of taking the money, Uygur walked away from the deal.

According to the Times, Uygur believed that the reason for this change came from political pressure from the Obama administration, which Uygur has been very vocal in criticizing. This is something Griffin denied in the same article, claiming that “the people in Washington” he had mentioned being unhappy with Uygur’s hosting were not White House officials but MSNBC producers.

Uygur’s most recent meeting with Griffin was a follow-up to an earlier conversation in April, in which Griffin told the host he was not booking enough Republican guests — an assessment Uygur disagreed with — and that he “used his arms too much when he talked.” However, the most notable statement reported coming out of that conversation, in both the Times and Uygur’s comments on YouTube and Countdown, was Griffin’s statement that the channel was part of the “establishment,” and that Uygur needed to “act like it.”

This appears to be the real crux of Uygur’s complaint: the idea of being forced to fit into the mainstream, when so much of his past commentary work had been based on criticizing the way mainstream media covers politics. As he told Olbermann during Countdown, his prior perceptions about how mainstream news works were confirmed as a result of his experience working with MSNBC.

“Are we [the mainstream media] going to be honest with our audience? Or are we going to trade information and truth we’re supposed to be gathering for access?,” was how Uygur summed up the debate for Olbermann. “Now that I’ve been inside that machine, it turns out that we were totally right about our outside perception of it. They are obsessed with access.”

There’s a cautionary tale here, because for many people working on the web, getting the kind of opportunities Uygur has gotten are the ultimate goal. But leaving behind the web’s independence for a larger platform can require compromises. And depending on the personalities involved, those compromises might be impossible.

Uygur, let’s be clear, will probably be just fine. Even if a potential deal with Current doesn’t work out, The Young Turks is still a notable independent web presence with a devoted audience. As Uygur concluded on YouTube:

I was able to take that tough stance [about MSNBC], and why? For the same reason I was able to get onto MSNBC in the first place — you guys. I’ve got the TYT army behind me. I’ve got a show that’s sitting here at half a billion views — up to a million views a day. So I can come back here and do exactly the kind of show I want to do, and kick ass and give you the actual truth and take it to power… Power is very very strong, and has so much influence in our media. But here at the Young Turks we’re going to fight against that.

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YouTube rolled out automatic captioning for Japanese videos, utilizing the same kind of speech recognition technology that’s also used to auto-caption videos in English. The video sharing site announced the launch of the feature late last week on its Japanese blog, and a YouTube spokesperson confirmed Tuesday via email that this is the first time automatic captioning is available in a language other than English. “We look forward to continuing to expand this feature to additional languages over time,” he added.

Users can now select automatic captioning for Japanese videos by clicking on the CC button and then selecting Transcribe audio:

YouTube rolled out auto-captioning for English-language videos in late 2009. The site expanded the feature to all of its English-language videos in March 2010.

Captions for online video recently came into the spotlight when disability advocates sued Netflix and CNN for failing to provide subtitles for each and every video the companies are serving up online. YouTube’s effort to bring auto-captioning to Japan has been hailed by the country’s Federation of the Deaf, but Google Technical Program Manager for Accessibility Engineering Naomi Black cautioned on Monday that publishers should merely understand the auto-captioning provided by the site as a starting point. On Google+, she explained:

As someone who posts content to YouTube, I wouldn’t rely on auto-captions without review, but it’s a great starting place for making accurate captions, since the video owner can download and edit the captions. And as a viewer, if the video owner hasn’t provided any captions, it does give you some insight into what the video is about.

There’s also another big benefit for publishers and Google alike in expanding automatic captioning: Captions make videos searchable, expanding the discoverability of videos both on YouTube itself as well as via Google. This could help to add more views and improve monetization of video assets.

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There are a lot of new features coming in iOS 5, and they should enable App Store developers to do a lot more with their software. Here are a few apps in particular that would benefit from what iOS 5 has to offer.

1. Pages

Apple’s own apps will likely be among the first to bring significant changes that leverage the power of iOS 5. Pages will get support for iCloud’s document syncing services, which means that changes you make on one iOS device should automatically be available to on another (and eventually on the desktop too), without any arduous setup requirements. Numbers, Keynote and other third-party editing suites like Documents to Go should get similar improvements in addition to Pages, which will make working with productivity apps on iOS devices much, much easier. Slide presentation apps will also get more useful thanks to Apple’s AirPlay mirroring feature on the iPad 2 that outputs whatever is on the tablet’s screen to a display device attached to an Apple TV.

2. CNN

One thing I initially liked about CNN’s iPhone and iPad apps was that they would provide push notifications for breaking news. Unfortunately, because of the way Apple implemented its notification system, breaking news updates became just another part of the stream of notification alert windows I had to dismiss to get to the home screen. Now, with the new notification bar and Notification Center, CNN’s breaking news updates will act as an unobtrusive daily record of key developments around the world. The best part is, this one doesn’t even require any action on the developer’s part; it’ll just happen when the new notification system is implemented.

3. Instagram

IOS 5 introduces Core Image, a new API that lets developers have access to hardware-accelerated video and photo enhancement as well as editing features. Built-in filters, color correction and facial recognition should make any photo app more versatile, but I think that if properly integrated in Instagram, it could help the photo-sharing service reach the next level. Used alone, or in tandem with Instragram’s existing filter set, individual user photos will look even more distinct, reducing the similarity that photos shared on the network can sometimes suffer from.

4. Real Racing HD 2

This one’s also a sure thing, as Real Racing HD 2 developer Firemint has already said it plans to support wireless AirPlay two-screen gaming once iOS 5 arrives. If you haven’t seen what playing this game on the iPad 2 and your TV with a wired connection is like, check out my video of the process. Doing the same thing without having to worry about yanking the Apple Digital AV Adapter out of your iPod’s dock connector is an exciting prospect, and it should make even more adventurous two-screen gaming applications a reality.

5. iMockups

I really could’ve chose any design or idea notebook app for this one, but iMockups is a particularly good example, because it’s designed with sharing in mind. In iOS 5, developers will have access to iMessage, so that apps can launch iMessage conversations between individuals or groups directly. For teams which have all members using iOS devices, it should make sharing mockup images for feedback with collaborators and stakeholders that much easier, and that much cheaper, too, since iMessage provides the convenience of MMS without the cost.

Have any other suggestions for apps you think will get a major boost from iOS 5?

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