You’re being a little too binary about this. The point isn’t that if objectivity is a myth then lies don’t exist, the statement is meant to challenge the idea that there is one side to a story. Hell in the US we basically say “there are two sides to each story,” when that isn’t true either.

Example: when did WWII start? Well, depends on who you ask. The Polish will tell you one thing, the French another, the Chinese will definitely tell you something different, because for them it began when Japan invaded Manchuria and had basically nothing to do with Germany. No one is wrong, but there isn’t one objective answer. That’s the point here. We have to consider multiple, sometimes somewhat competing narratives that still somehow don’t contradict each other. They can be acknowledged and integrated into a complex narrative. But we often want to reduce things, it’s a natural human tendency.

So whenever I see someone say something like “well Wikipedia is biased,“ well yeah, no shit. But that doesn’t mean anything. You account for the different narratives and perspectives people have, the different lenses through which they view the world, and you come to a conclusion. Going “I won’t be satisfied until I have an unbiased source” is not productive, and you would be surprised how many people act like that is the bar.

There’s a dry but still interesting work called That Noble Dream that is a pretty seminal historiographical work which covers “the objectivity question.”

I apologize if what I wrote came off as a trap. I am just trying to have a broader discussion about the demand for objectivity that we see people throw around pretty much daily. Politicians do it, pundits do it, people arguing online do it, it’s just this thing people do and I think we need to critically assess it. It is not meant to challenge you or trap somebody and going “haha you’re wrong.”

TL;DR: It’s just a critical assessment/discussion. Not a trap.

Objectivity isn’t meant to be a destination in the sense that it’s a place that one’s reporting can arrive at. It’s meant to be a process, one that can never be executed perfectly, but one that has the effect of improving the final product over what it would otherwise be.

Agreed. The thing is you get this but most people don’t. The right literally says “the biased media won’t cover that” they don’t even say “liberal bias” anymore. Fox News puts a lot of energy into saying they are “just the facts.“ It is seen as a moral good to be objective and factual, and “those other guys are biased.“ There’s this erroneous idea that news and history and such are supposed to be objective that is deeply internalized in the US.

Let me put it another way. This is how the current discourse goes:

“That article is biased therefore we should throw it out.”

What it should be instead is accounting for the bias, acknowledging it, and using it to contextualize the contents. It’s classic throwing baby out with the bath water. Except it’s incredibly deliberate and based on a moral imperative that does not make sense.