Exceed Objectivity?

The civic journalism is a journalistic campaign that rises in the United States at the end of 80's or at the beginning of 90's in the 20th century, it has already experienced the development process of more than ten years up to now, and has brought some true influence to the American society. After later of 90's in the 20th century, it was introduced into some other western flourishing capitalism countries such as Australia, etc. In 2004, it was first introduced to China in an article written by Cai Wen, who is a journalistic professor from Chinese People's University, and then quickly drew much attention from both the journalistic academic circles and journalists, meanwhile, some news column of televisions borrowed the concept of "public journalism" and used it to carry on a new practice of reporting.The emergence of the civic journalism is not by chance, it is a remedial action implemented by the news media when they were under the condition of facing the trust crisis itself and the democracy crisis in social lives. Generally speaking, it came forth because of a series of factors which had changed by then in American society. These factors included the social environment, the media environment and the thought foundations, and the latter contained some related principles that hided in the long-term journalistic practice and a political philosophy that rose in the 80's of the 20th century.What should be pointed out is that the civic journalism is not only a kind of journalistic practice, but also a kind of new theory of journalism. As a kind of thoroughly new theory of journalism, the civic journalism started the overall challenge to the objective journalism which has occupied the predominant position in the practice of journalism in the western countries over a long period of time. As far as the professional ideology by journalists is concerned, it lays claim to the professional ideology of a kind of participant, not the neutral or bystander which is glorified by the objective journalism. As to the role and function of news media in society, it advocates the news media to take on a kind of function of participating in the process of problem-solving, not the function of simply reporting or reflecting the problems. In the aspect of how the news media to treat their audience, it alleges that the news media should treat their audience as citizen who has its own consciousness and actively participate in the political and public lives, rather than the passive consumer of news and other information.There always are many disputes on the principles of the civic journalism. Though some of them are somewhat reasonable, they also made a certainly contracted mistake, and furthermore, in regard to the objective journalism that they support, a lot of aspects can be taken in to counter-question. In the sense, the civic journalism can be seen the concentrative performance of that counter-question.