Example of a current news organization that openly trumpets its bias and winks at the notion of objectivity: Fox News.
Is that really what you want? Just opposite extreems of that?
No thanks. I'd rather news people at least tried for objectivity, as an ideal, recognizing that they can never reach it. Though, yes, we need to recognize that, too.
The difference is that Fox claims to be "fair and balanced."
Objectivity is impossible, really. And our increasingly obsessive search for it has led to the current trend of journalism as stenography -- or, as Fox also says, "we report, you decide." What that leaves out is the concept of context -- an often overlooked but vital role of journalism.
We need to do a much better job of putting things in context, explaining how the issues of the day fit into the larger world. It's a very difficult task, especially in this land of the short attention span and lack of attention to detail, where people think that an "aw shucks" demeanor is more important than knowing the difference between a Civil War general (or a former White House press secretary) and the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. Or that announcing up front that you have no intention of responding to questions asks makes you a "maverick."
Some of us work very hard at presenting the whole story, constantly tweaking our efforts to reach those of the short attention span in the most efficient ways we can think of. We get precious little recognition for it. On a personal level, I'm proud of my team of journalists. We do look different, and we also look differently. While we don't have much sway over the pundits who dominate our airwaves, we make a lot of headway in the actual reporting of the news, and we especially make a difference in the online -- and much more permanent -- reporting.
I don't want to see Fox and its extreme opposite either. But recognizing that objectivity is a myth doesn't mean reporting with a slant. It means we our reporting is informed by what you know of the world and where you fit in, and because of that, we can (hopefully) help our readers understand that about themselves as well.
I think that you're talking about honesty, Helen, which is a different concept than "objectivity".
"Journalism took on the methods of science: detachment, nonpartisanship, reliance on facts, and balance."
This comment betrays a critical misunderstanding about how science actually works. Scientists weigh the facts and do not hesitate to provide an interpretation of their data (as well as the data/conclusions generated by others). I know of very few scientists who would hesitate to call bulls**t on either "facts" or interpretation that were obtained through unsound means.
This is why the so-called creation science/ID vs. evolution battle isn't taking place between scientists...it's taking place among NON-scientists, who have a tentative grasp of the form, but not the substance, of science.
In other words, "objectivity" only requires considering an opposing viewpoint based on its merits...but if it has no merit, then it can - and will be - dismissed (and often in very pungent terms - scientists are far from the dispassionate beings of myth).
A better way to describe it would be "Journalism aspired to imitate the popular model of science: detatchment, nonpartisanship, reliance on facts, and balance."
Elowe, are you familiar with the feminist critiques of science? They include the idea that there's plenty of crap in science because scientists have their own biases. For those not familiar with this, here's a summary: http://www.counterbalance.net/rj...femin-
body.html
My definition of journalistic objectivity is when a reporter finds something out, gets two independent sources of verification and it gets published without regard to who is going to like it and who won't. A reporter's job is to discover facts, they'll only discover a limited number of those. Ideally there will be enough reporters to get enough facts that in the process of reading them the general population will come to have a useful grasp of the actual situation. It's not a reporter's job to report 'both sides' it's a reporter's job to report verified facts. It's the job of any real journalism, not a says b says. Or as is most often the case now, R says this and this and this and this and d says this, we've got pretending it's the Free Press.
Great post, suzie.
I'm a working journalist. As a freelancer in the alternative media, I have great freedom to decide how I ought to work.
So, I spend a lot of time thinking about I want to take or leave from the ideal of journalistic objectivity.
In one sense, I strive to be objective. I try to deal in facts, evidence, and logic. When I'm reporting, I'm there to relay my observations as accurately as possible. I used to work in advertising where my job was to spin the truth. I cover political operatives who do the same thing. For advocates, every glossy spread or press release was a means to advance the end of selling more widgets or getting more votes. The truth didn't matter, except as a kind of limiting constraint. You weren't supposed to lie, and most people didn't. It's just that nobody was paying you to create an accurate impression of the widget. You were getting paid to make people feel as good about it as you possibly could.
As a journalist, my goal is to make people understand the truth as I see it. It's an objective fact that there's a lot of sexism in the world. I mean "objective" in the sense of being true regardless of what your opinion is. There's overwhelming evidence out there. My job isn't to make feminists or Democrats or leftists look as good as I can with the facts available, my job is to tell the truth in a way that's interesting and relevant. The biggest challenge in reporting is filtering. If you want proof of this, consider that the video camera has not made reporting obsolete.
Virtually every public event is video taped, but hardly anyone watches the raw footage. You read the news to find out what some human being with a perspective you value thought was relevant and interesting.
A reporter from Floor Coverings Monthly has a bias--information relevant to the capitalist carpet and linoleum trade. A reporter for the New York Times has the assumed needs and interests of the upper middle class ad-viewing consumer in mind. My filter is feminist and progressive. We're all out to tell the truth, but we may differ in the details we choose to report. It doesn't make any of us less objective in an important sense.
Thanks, Lindsay, and I hope others visit your site. All excellent points. Re: videotaping. Even then, someone has got to decide where to put the camera and when to turn it on and off. The event itself, such as a gov't hearing, may greatly filter who gets heard. The list goes on and on, but I think it's better if we understand the complexity.
Anthony, having 2 independent sources doesn't guarantee that something is true. For starters, no one is truly independent. Everyone has a perspective.
Also, journalists don't have unlimited time or space. Someone has to choose which people to interview about which issue. If a journalist isn't interested in such-and-such an issue, he's not going to look around for those 2 sources because he doesn't care.
Here's an example: In my career, I can't count how many inmates from jail or prison called the newspapers where I worked to say they were innocent and they wanted us to investigate their stories. Rarely was this a priority because 1) it would take a whole lot of work and 2) it was unlikely to prove anything. But I'm sure some of those guys WERE innocent.
Lindsay is in mah blogroll. 
Brava, to the post . . . and the newshound's (tiny dog's??) trope of recycling.
I've got to say that having had some knowledge of history in general and of the news business in particular, I always saw my role as a reporter as being an observer and a correspondent and not so much as being proverbially objective. After all, that's what they paid me for: to be discerning and watchful and dogged and to use words of my choosing to tell the tale.
Echidne, with a call for context, and Lindsay, when writing of faithfully relaying her observations, seem to be saying, at least in part, what I always thought was the ideal in the news business. I found that it was people outside of newsrooms who thought the ideal was objectivity. Later, as a flack, I even led a "how to deal with media types" memo with a substantial section disabusing my readers of the notion that the news business and reporters are objective and echoing (well, prefiguring, this was in '94) Suzie's references to individual and corporate agendas, personal life intrusions, time and money contraints and the like.
As with many endeavors, it's easy to criticize apparent flaws from the outside, and I am both a criticizer and full of flaws, but engaging in those endeavors and producing something of higher quality can be quite difficult and, often, spectacularly unsuccessful.
And then there's this too, I wonder how much of the public's expectation of objectivity comes from the academy, you know, the one that produces degreed, journalism "professionals" for a business that has absolutely no education or licensing or other requirements. This coming, I acknowledge, from someone who took the hack's way up from the bottom of the newsroom.
There is a big difference between thinking naively that you can be objective, like Anthony, and being a real journalist grounded in the world, with experiences and emotions like everyone else. Objectivity must be something else than a movement away from the world, like the God perspective of science Haraway like to mention. Some of the problem is about relations. Anthony does not see the relations between his two sources and their story, between him self and the "independent" sources, between him and the editor, between the editor and the reader and so on. The world is filled with stories and no sources can be independent...
Hear, hear, Peter. But don't you ever call me a real journalist. Them's fightin' words. Reporter, rewrite-man, copy-editor, desk editor . . . those will do fine. (Or, as a curious kid called out to me at a building collapse, "Hey, newsman," as if he had a Guild contract in his back pocket. One of the proudest days of my life. Sniff.) But I wanted to fight myself when it was "flack."
I wasn't thinking about you in particular. 'Journalist' and 'Scientist' are emblems, symbols of objectivity. I'm a researcher. When someone calls me a scientist I feel trapped in an enlightenment guild with a system of objectivity rules going back several hundred years. If I'm supposed to act like a sheep - who is the shepherd? And if I can't spot a shepherd, what's the argument for staying in the flock? Well, the paycheck of course, friends and colleagues, social status and so on... By the way, newsman sounds like a good epithet dude - if you're not a woman .
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