There’s a new report out from the Knight-Cronkite News Lab titled, “Beyond Objectivity: Producing Trustworthy News in Today’s Newsrooms.” According to the authors, objectivity is bad for a couple of reasons. The first is that some beliefs should never be questioned:
[W]hen misunderstood, journalistic “objectivity” or “balance” can lead to so-called “both-sides-ism” – a dangerous trap when covering issues like climate change or the intensifying assault on democracy.
You see, the cultural elites have already decided what the truth is on certain issues, such as climate change and the “assault on democracy,” and therefore there is no need to investigate opposing viewpoints. This sort of dogmatism sounds like the Catholic Church’s stance toward Copernicus. Now it’s the reporters who are the priestly class. They’ll let us know what the truth is, and we needn’t worry ourselves over the dissenting voices who contradict them.
But there’s a more insidious reason to reject objectivity:
Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press, said she has not used the word objectivity since the early 1970s because she believes it reflects the world view of the male white establishment. “It’s objective by whose standards? And that standard seems to be white, educated, fairly wealthy guys,” she explained. “And when people don’t feel like they find themselves in news coverage, it’s because they don’t meet that definition.”
The mainstream media “has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses,” Wesley Lowery, an influential 32-year-old Black Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has written. “And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers.”
Just flipping through newspapers of the past, I notice they cover things of local interest like schools, labor, city council meetings, transportation news, tax increases, weddings, obituaries, births, weather, sports, concert and theater reviews, as well as national and world news such as civil rights marches and legislation, news on hot wars and cold wars, and tons of other topics. Do these topics seem overly selective? Certainly there was some selectivity in that editors can’t cover all topics, so they picked topics that would be of interest to the most readers. Data compiled by Nielsen and reported by Pew Research shows that, from 1999 through 2014, white, black, and Asian ethnic groups all had nearly identical daily newspaper readership (and Hispanic readership was lower, but proportionate), so I guess editors did a pretty good job of providing what their readers of all ethnicities wanted. Yet this journalism school report would have us believe that only white people were served by objective news in the past. Even if that were true, which they haven’t established, that would not be an indictment on the principle of objectivity, but rather an accusation that past editors were not objective enough.
The answer, they say, is to strive for truth, not merely accuracy:
Accuracy starts with a commitment to verifiable facts, with no compromises. But facts, while true, aren’t necessarily the whole truth. Therefore, your journalists must consider multiple perspectives to provide context where needed. That said, avoid lazy or mindless “balance” or “both-sides-ism.” If your reporting combines accuracy and open-mindedness to multiple points of view, the result should still reflect the most honest picture of reality you can present – what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein call “the best available version of the truth.”
These goals–accuracy, multiple perspectives, open-mindedness to multiple points of view–are actually the definition of objectivity. The whole report is basically arguing that editors and news directors in the past failed to be objective because they excluded certain perspectives (female, people of color, etc.). But rather than say we need to do better–to be more objective by making sure we’re including points of view that have been allegedly excluded in the past–to be more open-minded, they argue instead that we should be just as closed-minded as in the past, but just change our prejudices. Include women and people of color, but now exclude white males and perspectives we don’t like (“like climate change or the intensifying assault on democracy”). Let’s do the same thing we say we oppose, but just turn the tables a little, and then insulate ourselves against charges of bias by claiming that objectivity is patriarchal and unattainable anyway. That way, we’re just as biased as we accuse the past of being, but it’s okay now because we’re not claiming to be objective anymore. We’re not even claiming to be merely accurate. We’re going for truth.
“Bias is truth” is the new journalistic standard. Perhaps we can add that to the Orwellian platitudes of “War is peace,” “Slavery is freedom,” and “Ignorance is strength.”
