Objectivity is a key element of journalism, which in our contemporary era has been supplanted in large measure by advertising-supported electronic hype machines.
Taking sports as an example, media coverage in the current era has tended to devolve to mere carnival barking.
In consequence, a talented big league baseball player with two or three good seasons under his belt according to the statistical standards of modern analytics, which as an aside, and while objective in the sense of remorseless mathematics, have made the game almost unwatchable because the human element has been savagely suppressed, is certain to be presumptively tagged by media outlets as a “future Hall of Famer,” or variously, in an even more annoying manifestation of short attention spans, as the GOAT (“greatest of all time”).
The click bait duly dangled, cyber flame battles commence. None of them contributes a jot to a greater understanding of baseball or any other relevant issue, although the thrill of vanquishing opponents on the Interwebz suffices as an updated variation of gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome, albeit it a form of mayhem pursued with mobile devices from the comfort of one’s upholstered armchair while pretending to “work” at home.
(As an aside, if the very same HoF-bound player has a single bad year, he’s forgotten, and likely never played baseball in the first place. The hype machine requires 24-7-365 feeding, and someone else easily becomes the new GOAT, thus sparing us, if only for another few milliseconds, the sheer horror of examining evidence for ourselves.)
America remains a place where pertinent criteria crawl off to die slow and painful deaths, but I remain undeterred. At the risk of offending the (dubious) mechanics of tilt-a-whirl electronic kaleidoscopes, allow me to suggest that it isn’t really possible to have the perspective necessary to form truly objective judgements without possessing a longer view, which in turn often is assisted by the simple act of ongoing chronology.
In short, one must allow a bit of time to pass.
As the eminent musical philosopher W. Axl Rose once wisely counseled, “All we need is just a little patience,” or an attention span sufficient to consider this brief history of Louisville brewing in five handy eras.
The Old World, 1778 – 1920
Louisville’s first brewers were from the British Isles; one of them, Hew Ainslie, was a political refugee and Scots nationalist poet. From the late 1840s, when the Germans came to America and...Read more
