My uncle used to argue with me in the 90s and 00s that journalists were generally objective because that was their job. That was the reason for their profession, so they just did it, like a nurse taking a temperature. He acknowledged that people had points of view and likely shaded one way or the other, but could not let go of the idea that because they were supposed to be that way, they approximated it by definition. He was referring to "real" journalists, from respectable outlets, not untrustworthy bloggers. Lots of people still feel that way, but the mask is pretty much off that this was true of only a percentage of journalists even in the Golden Age - whenever that was.
Socialists and even the few communists when I was young used to make a similar argument. Capitalism was about individuals getting ahead. It was every man for himself, dog-eat-dog competitive. But socialism, now, socialism was about everybody being taken care of. That is still how many people view it, that socialism takes care of everyone because that's what it is. That's what it was designed to do, dammit.
This expands into Barney Frank's statement that "government is just a word for things we decide to do together," a rather frightening irony once you know what Barney Frank decided to do together with other people. As with my uncle and the journalists, even big government advocates will acknowledge that government can get things wrong and need to be improved, but they retain the default assumption that getting together some sort of government program to fix something will be much better than not having a program. Sometimes it is. It's not the default setting, however. Government is not automatically, or even reliably, the greater good.
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