Objectivity (journalism) - Criticisms

Criticisms

Advocacy journalists and civic journalists criticize the understanding of objectivity as neutrality or nonpartisanship, arguing that it does a disservice to the public because it fails to attempt to find truth. They also argue that such objectivity is nearly impossible to apply in practice — newspapers inevitably take a point of view in deciding what stories to cover, which to feature on the front page, and what sources they quote. Media critics such as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) have described a propaganda model that they use to show how in practice such a notion of objectivity ends up heavily favoring the viewpoint of government and powerful corporations.

Another example of an objection to objectivity, according to communication scholar David Mindich, was the coverage that the major papers (most notably the New York Times) gave to the lynching of thousands of African Americans during the 1890s. News stories of the period often described with detachment the hanging, immolation and mutilation of people by mobs. Under the regimen of objectivity, news writers often attempted to balance these accounts by recounting the alleged transgressions of the victims that provoked the lynch mobs to fury. Mindich argues that this may have had the effect of normalizing the practice of lynching.

Historical (including social and cultural) factors have also shaped objectivity in journalism, as acknowledged and addressed in peace journalism. These are particularly relevant with regard to the large proportion of journalism about conflict. As noted below, with the growth of mass media, especially from the nineteenth century, news advertising became the most important source of media revenue. Whole audiences needed to be engaged across communities and regions to maximize advertising revenue. This led to "Journalistic Objectivity as an industry standard…a set of conventions allowing the news to be presented as all things to all people"). And in modern journalism, especially with the emergence of 24-hour news cycles, speed is of the essence in responding to breaking stories. It is not possible for reporters to decide "from first principles" every time how they will report each and every story that presents itself. So convention governs much of journalism.

Brent Cunningham, the managing editor of Columbia Journalism Review, argues that objectivity excuses lazy reporting. Objectivity makes us passive recipients of news, rather than aggressive analyzers and explainers of it. If a journalist is on a deadline and all he or she has is “both sides of the story”, that is often good enough, failing to push the story, incrementally, toward a deeper understanding of what is true and what is false. According to Cunningham, the nut of the tortured relationship with “objectivity” lies within a number of conflicting diktats that the press operated under; be neutral yet investigative; be disengaged but have an impact; be fair-minded but have an edge. Objectivity is not possible because we all have our biases, including journalists. No individual embodies all perspectives of a society. In 1996 the Society of Professional Journalists acknowledged this dilemma and dropped “objectivity” from its ethics code.

James Carey, a communications theorist, points out that we are entering a new age of partisanship.

Cunningham, however, argues that reporters by and large are not ideological warriors. They are imperfect people performing a difficult job that is crucial to society. “Despite all our important and necessary attempts to minimize our humanity, it can’t be any other way,” Cunningham concludes.