Posted on 09/26/2003 10:23:31 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
Would it be too controversial to disagree with Rush Limbaugh on one small point? Last Thursday, Rush was talking about a conversation he had with Robert L. Bartley, editor emeritus of the Wall Street Journal. Bartley apparently repeated his view – which he recently expressed in a WSJ editorial, titled "The Press: Time for a New Era?" – that the recent journalistic scandals at the BBC and the New York Times have demonstrated that "objectivity is dead."
That may be true, insofar as the BBC and the Times is concerned, but he went on to suggest in his column and to Rush something far more troubling: that impartiality in news reporting, having become a mere pretension, should be abandoned by the press. Journalists, he said, should just "stop wearing objectivity on their sleeves." Rush properly observed that "Liberals will not admit who they are, not in news and not even in politics." True enough, but Rush seemed sympathetic to the idea that newspapers should therefore just abandon their pretense of objectivity altogether.
I am writing to ask that Bartley reconsider his view and that Rush please give the matter more consideration. Rather than discard objectivity as misguided or unattainable, reporters and editors should closely embrace it – not only as a core principle of journalism, but as an essential element of accuracy.
Bartley is not alone in his view. In "The Failure of 'Objective' Journalism," Gary Rosenblatt, the editor and publisher of The Jewish Week asked, the question, "Can, and should, journalists strive for objectivity?" No, he answered, asserting that not only is objectivity an unattainable goal, it is also a misguided one. Both Bartley and Rosenblatt seemed to have taken their editorial cues from a recent article by Brent Cunningham, managing editor of the liberal Columbia Journalism Review titled, "Re-Thinking Objectivity." In that article, Cunningham suggested that objectivity actually impedes a reporter's pursuit of the truth and that journalism would be better served if the concept were simply discarded.
A close reading of Cunningham's article, however, reveals serious flaws in the author's thinking about journalistic objectivity. While billed as an assault against objectivity, the article amounted to a series of complaints about several traditional challenges faced by journalists while gathering the news. While those challenges are real, the author failed to show why they arise from a reporter's devotion to objectivity.
For example, he says "Objectivity makes [reporters] wary of seeming to argue with the president – or the governor, or the CEO – and risk losing our access." (Granted, it is rather startling to read someone suggest that the press has been wary of seeming to argue with the president, but let's take the statement at face value). The connection between a reporter's unwillingness to challenge the powerful for fear of losing his access is clear. What is not clear is what this has to do with objectivity.
If a reporter intentionally or recklessly distorts the truth about the president, governor or CEO, he deserves to lose his access. One who reports the news objectively, yet pursues the truth aggressively, may nevertheless risk losing access, but I fail to see how "re-thinking" objectivity is going to solve this timeless challenge of news reporting. A reporter who becomes more biased is not likely to improve his access, unless his bias favors those whom he covers. Is Cunningham suggesting that reporters increase their bias in favor President Bush?
Hardly. He suggested just the opposite when he asserted that "objectivity" impeded the press from aggressively pursuing the Bush administration's plans for military action against Iraq. (Apparently, Cunningham doesn't read the New York Times, which waged a veritable crusade on both its editorial pages and news pages against the war in Iraq). While the question of what stories to cover, and how aggressively those stories get pursued may be influenced by the biases of a reporter or his editors, there are practical limitations on how such biases will affect story selection.
If a newspaper completely abandoned rational journalistic judgment in determining what's newsworthy, it will find itself wholly out of step with the rest of the journalistic community. To see this principle in practice, you need only compare what the supermarket tabloids deem important to the story selection of your typical metropolitan newspaper. Objectivity does not interfere with decisions about newsworthiness – such decisions, if anything, depend upon objectivity.
Nevertheless, Cunningham strangely attributes these traditional journalistic problems to the press's devotion to objectivity. But notice how each of these examples (as were his others) concerned problems associated with how the news is gathered, rather than how the news is reported (or distorted).
As a result, his frustration with several traditional problems which journalists have faced for decades is misdirected, mere straw men to be used to build an excuse for his attack on objectivity as a journalistic ideal. More important, his failure to distinguish between the functions of news gathering and news reporting revealed a serious misunderstanding of the concept of objectivity.
Objectivity had been long recognized by professional journalists for what it is: an essential element of accuracy. In the early 1920s, Melville E. Stone, the founder of the Associated Press sent a bulletin on press style to his correspondents. In it, he affirmed the indispensable association between objectivity and accuracy:
Associated Press stories must be accurate and accuracy involves not only the truthfulness of individual statements but the co-relation of these statements in such a way as to convey to the reader a fair and unbiased impression of the story as a whole.
As an element of accuracy, objectivity means separating news from opinion. It's about "Seeing the world as it is, not how you wish it were," as one journalism professor recently put it. It is perfectly acceptable to see the world "as you wish it were" within the confines of an editorial or op-ed column, but news articles must show the world as it is, not as a reporter or his editors wish it were.
Sure, reporters and editors have their biases, and only an inhuman automaton could perfectly prevent his ideological views of the world from slanting his news reporting to favor those views. But objectivity is no less a goal of journalism than truth is a goal of humanity. We may not ever fully learn the truth about the universe or the cause of a particular traffic accident, but the pursuit of the truth is not an activity I should expect be "re-thought" or abandoned.
Objectivity may be a pretension in some news organizations – like the BBC and the New York Times – but its pursuit is no more beyond human capacity than is the pursuit of the truth. Journalistic judgment may be unavoidably influenced by a person's ideological beliefs, but it need not be guided by it.
With a diligent pursuit of the facts and an honest application of common sense, the truth will be discovered and reporters committed to journalistic integrity will, for the most part, find a way to report it accurately and objectively. Imperfections are to be tolerated with any human activity, and it is far better to tolerate them than to permit reporters and editors to make imperfection an aim of journalistic activity rather than the exception.
This is not to say that a newspaper should not express a point of view. Objectivity is not a core principle of an editorial page. Thus, a newspaper is perfectly justified in making its editorial page the party of opposition. Editorials are not news stories, and objectivity is not among their expected virtues.
But when a paper slants what the public perceives as "straight" news articles to advance its political or ideological views, the paper is engaging in a form of journalistic fraud. Biased news reports are dishonest, because when editorial opinion is "passed off" as straight news, the opinion is afforded a level of credibility that it doesn't deserve.
Biased reports amount to a much greater breach of journalistic integrity than any of the acts perpetrated by the likes of Jayson Blair, who fabricated a few interviews, copied the work of colleagues and lied about datelines. Such lapses a paper strives to correct upon discovery. News bias is rarely discovered among like-minded journalists and is not likely to be corrected.
The Columbia Journalism Review, while a left-wing institution, remains a vanguard among journalists, supposedly representing the most advanced thinking in journalism. It is thus deeply disturbing to read in its pages a polemic against objectivity. Its flawed thinking has already made its way onto some prominent editorial pages, on both the left and the right.
Let's hope there will be some resistance to allowing this assault against journalistic integrity to continue to make its way onto news pages. It is already destroying the front page of the New York Times. Who's next?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.