The CJR Campaign Desk interviewed Daniel Okrent of the NYT on the subject of objectivity. Okrent is referred to as the Public Editor, which means that the Times hired him to some extent to criticize the Times. What a job. In any case, Okrent’s columns are worth a read if you have the time.
One of the principles espoused by the Project for Excellence in Journalism is that its practitioners should be allowed to exercise their own personal conscience. That’s not a license for individual journalists to espouse a particular viewpoint, to editorialize in the context of a news story. After all, journalism’s “essence is a discipline of verification.” Listen to the sources, but verify what they tell you.
Okrent pointed out, and I agree with him on this point, that many journalists have held themselves back because if they point out the veracity of a statement made by a talking head (a.k.a. a “source” for a story), the journalist would be accused of bias. And the journalist, relying on “an imprecise definition of objectivity,” would refrain from either pointing out the statement’s veracity or withholding the statement at all.
A recent report by Frontline, The Persuaders, pointed out how the term “Estate Tax” became the more imprecise “Death Tax,” using some of the most up-to-date methods that marketing executives use to convince people to purchase their products. Many other examples from politics were also pointed out in Chapter 5 of that episode. The Contract with America also passed through the same process to ensure the wording was fine-tuned to sound as digestible and pleasant as possible, even if the positive wording was entirely hollow.
These particular failures of journalism in the early 90s, a failure to point out the truth behind the rhetoric, did not just come from a lack of objectivity, but a misunderstanding of objectivity. The professors in Nashville who lectured on the idea that objectivity is dead carried that message because, as they put it, everything you know from your journalism textbooks is wrong. To be honest, I don’t know what those textbooks are saying. Do jouralism textbooks really say you should get both sides of the story and report them, without engaging in a process of verification?
This is probably where Postmodernism comes in. We get lies coming to us from the left and the right. We get bombarded with lies from media companies and marketing firms. I’m not saying this to be cynical — there are plenty of good companies and good politicians out there. However, the Pomo philosophy does not seem to acknoledge the idea that people do lie (or, to use the more diplomatic term, “misrepresent”) to achieve particular ends (selling products, getting elected). Perhaps I’m wrong, but lies do seem to make for a very serious downfall of the Pomo mindset — that FOX News is okay, even if they are presenting a particular viewpoint.
FOX, by the way, blatently violates several of the journalistic ideals. Their editorial process begins with a declaration of how today’s news will be presented from a high-level executive; that cuts out the ability of the practitioners to exercise their conscience. Their first obligation should be to the truth, but their first obligation of each day is instead to a particular viewpoint that comes from above. Their first loyalty should be to citizens, but their first loyalty is instead to their paychecks. They should be engaged in a process of verification, but they engage instead in a process of shouting heads (and FOX is certainly not the only one guilty of this).
In the first Pomo session I attended in Nashville, the professor made the claim that objectivity was introduced in journalism for monetary reasons. It’s not a surprise. Back then, newspapers were openly biased, and consumers were looking for a news source they felt they could trust. A market deficiency existed, so there was profit potential for “objective” news reporting. Today, news organizations are preoccupied with scandals, in-fighting, and their usual ugly practice of sensationalism. The rise of the Internet has greased the rails toward a loss of confidence in traditional news organizations and “objective” journalism. The danger that exists now is in taking the Pomo mindset too far — that there is no objective truth.
To quote Michael Polanyi, “Objectivity does not demand that we estimate man’s significance in the universe by the minute size of his body, by the brevity of his past history or his probable future career. It does not require that we see ourselves as a mere grain of sand in a million Saharas. It inspires us, on the contrary, with the hope of overcoming the appalling disabilities of our bodily existence, even to the point of conceiving a rational idea of the universe which can authoritatively speak for itself.” To explain part of the quote, Polanyi was a philosopher rooted in science, hence the search for a rational idea of the universe. Journalists, having their first obligation to the truth, should probably heed Polanyi’s realization that turned him into a philosopher: that “ideologies were being employed to hinder free scientific expression and inquiry.”
My cynical take on Pomo journalism is that ideologies are today being employed to hinder journalistic independence and the pursuit of truth. My cynical take on Mo journalism is that too much trust is placed in too few sources. My take on the Project for Excellence in Journalism is that it establishes a higher standard of ethics than what any particular fad in philosophical thinking can whip up. What I would hate to see is that the presentations made in Nashville are taken too seriously, as that would result in a form of journalism that resulted in the first consumer backlash against ideological newspapers to begin with. Then, we’d be back to the “objective” drawing board.
