You’re probably already sick of Weigelgate (and if you don’t know what that is, here’s a primer from Weigel himself so that you can commence becoming sick of it), but there has been at least one development in this saga that’s worth exploring further: the very public rift it has opened in the Washington Post offices.

On one side stand the Post’s ombudsman and the assorted staff writers who’ve been speaking to Jeffrey Goldberg off the record; on the other, Post reporter-bloggers Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent. One side dismisses bloggers like Weigel, Klein and Sargent as partisan hacks; the other responds that their openness about their beliefs confirms, rather than compromises, their integrity as journalists.

It’s not hard to see the implications of this argument for journalism in general. Weigelgate has instigated a long-overdue fight within the bowels of a major newspaper over the relative merits of traditional, self-consciously impartial reporting and opinionated coverage. It’s an old skirmish, but not one that has ever been fought with this level of intensity, before such a wide audience. And perhaps now that it’s out in the open, we can expose the misguided, antiquated ideology its supporters have dubbed “objective journalism” for what it really is.

Because, make no mistake, it is an ideology — one predicated on the notion that human beings can educate one another on complex, hotly contested issues without using any sort of subjective or ideology-based language or ordering principle. Maybe this isn’t an unreasonable argument to make a priori, but by now, experience should have taught us that the opposite is true. Human language is too complex, too subjective, and too ambiguous to express non-mathematical propositions in wholly mathematical, objective terms. Human perception is too impressionable and susceptible to self-editing for it to capture, much less perfectly reproduce, a completely unslanted cluster of objective facts. And when journalists behave as if these things are untrue, it distorts their coverage in curious, frequently unacknowledged ways.

In fact, I wrote about one of those ways last week, in a column about the national media’s insistence on framing the Gulf oil spill as a campaign narrative. This needlessly constricts a reporter’s critical assessment skills, forcing her to instead use recycled campaign narratives as a crutch. These campaign narratives are themselves ideological, in that they privilege the interests of the political elite (public image, electoral advantage) over the often far more urgent interests of the public (in this case, an economically and environmentally blighted Gulf Coast). In choosing who to cater to, the reporter must make a subjective, values-based decision; her professional code of conduct then requires that she mask these values as simple empirical reasoning.