Read the following passage carefully.
The aesthetic of "objective detachment" that dominated mid-twentieth-century American journalism was long heralded by its practitioners as a moral imperative, a commitment to presenting unvarnished facts free from authorial bias. Yet historians of media have increasingly recognized that this stylistic standard did not originate from a philosophical dedication to pure truth. Rather, it emerged as an economic byproduct of the nineteenth-century wire services. Because these syndicates relied on selling the same news reports to a multitude of local newspapers spanning a wide and often polarized political spectrum, any partisan coloration would have alienated potential subscribers. Thus, a flattened, strictly factual reporting style was adopted as a commercial necessity, ensuring maximum syndication.
By the 1960s, a cadre of writers known as the New Journalists began to aggressively dismantle this paradigm. Writers like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion argued that the traditional mandate of objectivity was not merely an illusion, but a straitjacket that structurally prevented reporters from capturing the complex psychological and sociological realities of an era defined by profound cultural upheaval. To access these deeper truths, they appropriated the techniques of realist fiction: scene-by-scene construction, exhaustive detailing of status symbols, and the capturing of dialogue in its entirety.
However, the New Journalists were sharply divided on the role of the authorial voice. While Capote attempted to completely erase his own presence from his narratives, seeking to create a "nonfiction novel" that appeared to unfold autonomously, Didion explicitly foregrounded her own psychological state, operating on the premise that the observer's subjectivity is inextricably bound to the reality being observed.
The passage provides the most support for which of the following inferences regarding the "moral imperative" mentioned in the first paragraph?
- AIt was a principle originally championed by nineteenth-century wire services to justify their economic strategy to politically polarized newspapers.
- BIt was a universally accepted standard that successfully guaranteed that mid-twentieth-century journalism remained completely devoid of authorial bias.
- It functioned as a retrospective justification by mid-twentieth-century journalists for a stylistic convention that originally emerged from economic expediency.Answer
- DIt was an illusion that structurally prevented nineteenth-century wire services from capturing the complex psychological and sociological realities of their era.
- EIt was a mandate fundamentally rejected by the New Journalists, who unanimously agreed that reporters must explicitly foreground their own subjectivity to reveal deeper truths.