"Sarajevo" and Objectivity

Wow. British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom sure did an excellent job of making the audience FEEL the stakes in that objectivity vs. personal involvement based conflict that dominated the thoughts of the film's protagonists. And the concept of objectivity in reporting has always been a fascinating one to me, and it's also probably the reason why I ended up writing reviews and columns instead of news stories. Objectivity is arguably one of the most important aspects of reporting, and researching the idea of "empathy" for the "Welcome to Sarajevo" critique made me think of the similarities between journalists and members of the medial field in this respect. It's this objecitivy that many attribute to journalists and doctors having a greater capacity to do good, but as we witnessed in the film, members of the medial community don't usually have to contend with having their harrowing and necessary stories becoming pushed into the realm of afterthought at the expense of entertainment fluff. The line between objevtivety and opinion is always one I think a good reviewer should straddle...reviews by nature reflect the opinion of the writer, and opinions are completely subjective. But I think another purpose of a review story is to adequatley explain the reasoning behind the writer's opinion, and it that way it has to take a more neutral and methodical approach.