The Myth of Objectivity

She tried to make a joke of it. At the debate in Cleveland last week, Hillary Clinton brought up a "Saturday Night Live" skit about journalists fawning over Barack Obama at a mock debate. "Maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow," said Clinton. Humor is often a substitute for anger, and if Clinton wasn't all that funny, maybe it is because she is sore at the press for seeming to go easier on her opponent. She has a point, but the truth about the media and the campaign cannot be caricatured simply as the deification of Obama and the hounding of Clinton.

The pols and the people invest the press with great power. Conspiracies abound. Right-wing talk-show hosts love to go on about the liberal media establishment. Lefty commentators accuse the press of rolling over for George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq. Politicians of all stripes accuse the press of being unfair, even cruel. Sometimes we are. On the day Vice President George H.W. Bush announced for the presidency in October 1987, he watched as his 28-year-old daughter, Doro, wept when she picked up NEWSWEEK's cover story that week, picturing Bush driving his speedboat under the cover line FIGHTING THE 'WIMP FACTOR.' Bush was, understandably, furious. The phrase "wimp factor" came from Bush's own pollster, and we said he was fighting it, but we nevertheless left the impression that we were calling the vice president a wimp. In the end, the story had little impact because voters already understood that Bush, a World War II hero, was plenty tough. He was elected president the next year.

Certainly, there are editors and publishers who would like to be kingmakers, or just kings.

I write a daily syndicated news-based humor service for radio DJs, and one of the things I hear back most often from clients is how much they appreciate that the news items we write to set up our topical jokes are accurate, objective and PC-free. So after doing this for 17 years, I know a little bit about how to write a new story. And while it's impossible to be completely objective (just choosing to run one story instead of another is a subjective judgment), I can assure you that:

1. It's possible to get a heck of a lot closer to objectivity than most mainstream media news outlets do; and

2. The claim that they are not politically biased is hilarious.

I stopped watching ABC's World News Tonight because of the blatant bias: the disparity in time given to the liberal vs. conservative side, the ascribing of motives for people's actions that they couldn't possibly know, the use of words loaded with negative connotations in introducing the conservative view, etc. etc. I could go through any of those scripts with a blue pencil and denude it of 95% of the liberal bias in 15 minutes, so I always find it laughable that all those "professional journalists" with the Ivy League degrees have the stones to claim with a straight face that it's all in the viewers' imaginations and can't be any more objective than it is.

Sidenote: I once interviewed Penn Jillette, and he told me he had covered the '92 presidential conventions for the Comedy Channel (now Comedy Central). He said that at the GOP Convention, all the reporters in the press room were mocking Bush for saying the liberal media were against him. So he stood up on a chair and in his famous booming voice, asked, "Excuse me, quick poll! How many people here voted for Bush in 1988?" He said they all just stared at him in confusion, and nobody raised a hand. So he said, "Okay, you're right! Bush is crazy to think you're against him!"

it's impossible to be completely objective (just choosing to run one story instead of another is a subjective judgment)

True - but that isn't even the half of it. The decision to run any stories at all is not objective. And neither is the decision to run only new stories.
Journalists call themselves "the press," and have an organization called the "National Press Club" - but journalism as we know it did not exist when the First Amendment was ratified. Journalism as we know it is an artifact of the telegraph and the Associated Press, which came in in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
In the founding era, Jefferson and Hamilton waged their political battles in partisan newspapers which they sponsored. And before the advent of the telegraph "wire," newspapers had no source of news which was reliably "new" to all of their readers. So "newspapers" of that era were often weeklies - and some had no deadline at all and just went to press when they were good and ready. Naturally, a "newspaper" such as that would be heavily laced with opinion and would have no basis on which to claim objectivity since its competitors would have different perspectives and would have no reason to defer to the superior wisdom or "objectivity" of any other paper.
As a monopolistic entity, the Associated Press had to claim objectivity to deflect criticism. So modern AP newspapers likewise purport to be objective - and simultaneously refuse to question the objectivity of any other AP newspaper. The modern newspaper openly expresses its publisher's opinion only on the editorial page, thereby positioning the rest of the paper as being objective.
The Market for Conservative-Based News

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