Politics & Power Quote by Howard Fineman

Objectivity is the religion American political journalism keeps pretending it still practices, and Fineman punctures it with one clean sentence. By yoking “the cosmos” to “politics,” he makes a sly move: if even the universe resists a god’s-eye view, then the newsroom certainly can’t manufacture one on deadline. The line isn’t an excuse for partisan spin; it’s a refusal of the comforting myth that any observer can stand outside the system they’re describing.

The intent is corrective. Fineman is warning against the lazy neutrality that masquerades as fairness: quoting two sides, splitting the difference, laundering power’s claims as “one perspective.” His subtext is that every frame is a choice - what counts as news, which sources are credible, which facts are foregrounded, which harms are treated as “costs.” Even deciding what “objective” means is culturally loaded.

Contextually, this fits the post-2016 media reckoning, when “both-sides” habits collided with asymmetric realities: one camp treating institutions as flawed but legitimate, another treating truth as optional and outrage as strategy. Fineman’s line also nods to a deeper journalistic dilemma: objectivity isn’t a state of being; it’s a performance standard, and sometimes a shield. Claiming to be above politics can function as a way to avoid moral clarity - or to hide whose interests a story’s default assumptions serve.

What works is the scale. “Cosmos” gives the sentence humility and bite, turning a newsroom debate into an epistemological one: you can’t escape perspective, so you’d better be honest about yours.