Objectivity

About Objectivity
An Essay by Ted Pease
©1992

“Show me a man who thinks he’s objective and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself.”

— Henry Luce, founder, Time magazine

In his book, Discovering the News, Michael Schudson (1978) focuses on concepts of objectivity, the journalist’s need for self-justification, for distance between himself and events, in a sense, the same kind of distance that the savvy politician would call “deniability.” The question is what that means in the context of the times in which a journalist works, the shifting sands of definitions and perceptions of news and the role of the press in a society. The struggle is between values and fact, between opinion and information, the former in each case being somehow more suspect, less dependable, than the latter.

Why, Schudson asks, should journalists be objective? Objectivity assumes some kind of yardstick, an objective (that is certified, unassailable, uniform and universally accepted) measure against which to gauge a thing. In the hard sciences, such measures predominate — temperatures, densities, velocities, masses, frequencies and so on. In the law, objective measures are ordained, but no less absolute: legislated and adjudicated regulations against which to assess individual circumstances.

Schudson excuses journalists from the kind of professionalism exercised by doctors, lawyers and scientists, saying that the press has no “apparatus” by which to guarantee objectivity. I would disagree. The press of the 1990s certainly has many of the same kinds of “apparatuses” that ensure professionalism in those other fields — extensive training, professional standards, examinations, competition, public scrutiny and peer review (albeit no licensure). The difference is in the field itself. Unlike hard science — an ever-growing body of knowledge based on some immutable bedrock of basic and unchanging facts — and the law — evolving from a framework of basic and constant rules and beliefs — journalism makes its home in the ever-changing arena, or marketplace, of ideas and beliefs that is society. Where the law and the hard sciences have constants against which to measure developments, no such yardstick can exist in journalism, a “science” of human psychology in a constantly changing environment where yesterday’s judgments may not hold today and where one practitioner’s unit of measure is unlike any other. Unlike science, where facts are assumed to be absolute, and the law, which distinguished between legal or technical questions and moral or value judgments, in journalism it simply isn’t possible to separate facts from an individual journalist’s personal value structure. There is the difference.

The concept of objectivity is by nature elitist; it assumes that there is one “truth,” a correct answer. Where there is a yardstick by which to measure, such an assumption may be understandable — water does, after all, boil at 212 degrees Farenheit (except under certain conditions...); U.S. civil law does not permit someone to take his neighbor’s new car (except under certain conditions...), etc. These are not elitist standards but they are more or less absolute. Professional objectivity is in some ways a moral philosophy or standard by which to live, an acknowledgement of whose standards by which to judge one’s own actions and behavior. Such objective standards are undergirded by social controls, such as education and training to achieve sufficient knowledge by which to make judgments acceptable by acknowledged standards, and social distance — insulation from public pressures, professional autonomy and independence from societal whim, as well as the professional’s personal insulation from his or her own values. Further, desire for objectivity assumes distrust of the individual, of the self.

What kind of journalist could espouse such objectivity, operating in a professional vacuum in reporting events as if from Olympus? Still, depending upon whose ox is being gored, the press is regularly derided for its lack of objectivity, as if being “objective” were either desirable or possible.

Through the last 200 years, in the evolution of the modern press ideal in America, concepts of professionalism and objectivity have changed with the marketplace and the society in which the marketplace exists. It is ironic that “objectivity” should be something after which so-called “professional journalists” have strived, because what it connotes is lack of individual judgment, reliance upon codified standards instead of critical thought, subordination of context, perspective and individuality in favor of rote and routine. What “objectivity” must mean for the journalist is fairness, balance and context in reporting facts about the day’s events. More than the Who-What-Where-When-How formula of hard news reportage — a formula that serves a valid and valuable function — is the necessary inclusion of Why in the equation: context, implications and meaning.

Lippmann in 1930 wrote that any society’s press will naturally evolve through four stages of development: From a government monopoly in the first stage, the press will move into a party stage, in which newspapers are controlled by partisan political forces; in the third stage, both government and partisan forces will be overtaken by commercial interests and the market, dominated by an increasingly large mass of readers. Lippmann’s fourth stage is “professional,” in which, through superior training and judgment, journalists would be free of (above?) the changing tastes and prejudices of the market and strive for “objective fact.” Such a view of press in society as a natural, evolutionary process necessarily assumes different perspectives on the role — desirability, even — of objectivity in the process.

In the 1830s, a democratized penny press (Lippmann’s third stage) infuriated and threatened the American aristocracy. Prior to the advent of the penny press, beginning with the arrival of the New York Sun in 1833, newspapers in America were either mercantile — serving the economic interests of the gentry — or party press — espousing particular political lines — or both. In either case, the press of the early 1800s served elites, both political and economic, and their content reflected their audiences and economic self-interests. Circulations were small and content was decided by market pressure and the intensely personal preferences of the editors or the political or mercantile interests that subsidized them. “Objectivity” clearly was no issue here, because content was defined as parochial and partisan.

With the increased democratization of American society in the early 19th century, more people were able to read, more people were concentrated in cities and technology was making it easier to produce larger numbers of newspapers. One outcome was a boom in the number of American papers (daily circulation quadrupled between 1830 and 1840) and a concomitant boom in audience. Newspapers of the penny press era concentrated less on partisan editorializing and more on news and “facts” of the day. One result, according to a disgusted aristocracy, was a shameful lack of decency and propriety in a press that had no regard for personal privacy. “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants,” wrote James Fenimore Cooper in 1838, “it is only to establish a tyranny of their own. The press tyrannizes over publick men, letters, the arts, the stage, and even over private life. Under the pretense of protecting publick morals, it is corrupting them to the core...”

Maybe so, but the penny press opened journalism to the public in a rush of printed democratization, publishing items of interest not to an elite audience of merchants and bankers, but to a general public. Content was market-driven, aimed at a reader who was a human being; advertising was limited only to those who could pay and editorial content was determined by events. Because the penny papers catered to no particular audience, they espoused no particular party line, instead actively striving to be indifferent to political news. As society in the 1830s and 1840s diversified, so did the content of the penny press, which attempted to represent events of the world colorfully but without partisanship, a fair definition of early “objective truth” in reporting. Schudson calls these journalists “naive empiricists.” They concentrated on timeliness, proximity and human interest, creating a news product of relevance to people living in the communities they served. Indeed, the penny papers saw as their function the reporting of everyday events, not because they were significant, but because they might become part of a larger, more significant context.

That increasing faith in “objective fact” evolved in the era of the penny press is no accident. It was also a period of “Jacksonian Democracy” in which American society evinced a growing faith in the common man, in political and economic opportunity and equality. Such a view of the citizenry required an presumption in favor of the democratic marketplace of ideas, assuming that, as Milton had written two centuries before, Truth would win out in a free and open encounter with Falsehood. In the process, readers were presented with “the facts, ma’am, just the facts,” without the embellishment of editorial comment. Although James Gordon Bennett and others of the penny press era recognized the necessity of providing context for “dull records of facts,” the emphasis was on simply providing the data for the reader’s own interpretation.

By the end of the 19th century, this belief in facts and distrust of editorial value judgment had evolved into the newspaper wars of Hearst and Pulitzer, in which embellishment of fact by editorial comment was unnecessary in view of the competing newspapers’ embellishment of facts themselves. Hearst’s famous alleged message to Frederic Remington in Havana that, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war” is emblematic of the beating facts took during the yellow journalism period. While Hearst was obsessed with building circulation at any cost, other publishers, however, including Pulitzer, were more concerned that their newspapers presented the readers with a fair view of the world.

Of course, “fair” is open to interpretation; during this period, it was not uncommon for reporters to write in documentary form, true to facts but with as much intention of entertaining as informing. As newspapers evolved through the 19th century, however, so did the role of journalist and the expectations placed upon the reporter to live up to public standards of truth and decency in recounting of facts, while providing the public with entertainment.

At the same time, all-consuming desirability of facts resulted, by 1900, in what many reporters criticized as dry, “laundry list” journalism. Consistent with the age of realism and the mechanization of the industrial revolution, some writers of the period saw the predominance of fact as resulting in machine-like copy, colorless, humorless, personality-less, what Mencken later recalled as a craze for “mathematical accuracy.”

None of which was equated at the time with objectivity, a concept which must acknowledge the existence of individual subjectivity of perception, a non-issue in the race for facts and information.The assumption of the period was that facts were not a reporter’s statements about the world but rather empirical attributes of the world itself. But all that changed with World War I and the discovery of propaganda’s perceived power to affect what had been thought to absolute values — facts about the world. At this point, journalists began to differentiate between facts and values, a response to a world in which, suddenly, facts could not be trusted, where objective fact did not exist.

Ivy Lee, the first great pioneer of public relations, drew on Lippmann’s assessment that no individual can collect all the facts on a subject. Rather, Ivy said, all one could strive for was to give one’s own interpretation of the facts. For the first time, issues of perceptions and individual biases were recognized as influencing an individual’s ability to report “facts” about the world. How “facts” are perceived — and if they are perceived at all — which parts of those facts are retained and which are rejected and which facts are used and which are discarded in reporting “factually” about the world all must be recognized as factors in the reporting process.
Those calling for interpretation of facts on the part of reporters — what to the fact-oriented realists of the late 1800s would have been seen as a blurring of the news/opinion line they had tried so hard to draw — suggested that such critical assessment of information by the reporter was a means of providing the kind of context called for by the Hutchins Commission in 1947, a means of placing events in relation to broader trends.

In Public Opinion, Lippmann said the dilemma of journalists in the 1920s and ‘30s was in their awareness of individual subjectivity and the battle between personal values and individual selectivity, and the journalist’s responsibility to report and explain events. The concept of “objectivity” tried to provide a framework in which reporters could work and readers could believe. Lippmann saw inability of reporters to transmit reliable information to the public as a threat to democracy, a threat posed, in part, by the subjectivity of facts. Without reliable information, he said, news is all second-hand, and society responds not to facts, but to opinions, what he called the “pseudo-environment” of news accounts. The answer, Lippmann thought, was in professional training, codified standards, a “science” of journalistic method.

Part of the fear stemmed from the success of Lee and others to place what was perceived as slanted information directly before the public through the press. First big business and then big government became adroit at managing the news, to the degree that journalists in the 1930s accused the FDR administration of censoring information and disseminating propaganda, serious charges in the era of perceived media maximum effects. The fear that government press officers insulated officials from the public and hindered journalists in getting at the truth was one of Luce’s motivations in setting up the Hutchins Commission; behind the fear about institutional manipulation of the news was the question of not just what objective fact was true, but whose objective fact.

Perhaps the low-water mark came during the McCarthy era, when the press, uncertain of its ability to shift “facts” and get at truth, permitted itself to be manipulated into publishing every charge and accusation as objective fact, on the basis that since McCarthy had made the statements — however inflammatory — they existed as fact. Reporters, locked into reporting all events as fact without interpretation or context and fearful of violating their traditional mandate to report “objectively” without inserting their own “biases,” simply repeated McCarthy’s statements without investigating or even commenting on whether they were true.

Distrust of institutionally manufactured “news,” what Boorstin called “pseudo-events,” spread beyond the journalists’ ranks to the general public in the 1960s and the critical society of the Vietnam era. Social activism was based on individual critical assessment of not only social institutions but on a reappraisal of the “truths” that had been held to be self-evident. Distrust of the government in the early ’70s reached nearly 60 percent and voters participated more critically in the election process, questioning and evaluating candidates who, in earlier times, would have been elected or defeated merely on the basis of party affiliation. Journalists also reassessed their performance, their role in the society and their long-held “security blanket” of objectivity.

Chief among the criticisms of the traditional premise of journalistic objectivity was that “news” is biased in its basic institutional definitions, in its form and structure, and in its dependence on official sources. Jack Newfield suggested that the institutional mind-set in which journalists operate creates initial biases in the professional values which all journalists espouse, while claiming total objectivity. These ingrown biases are not just societal — Western values, the Puritan work ethic, belief in God, home and hearth — and inculcated from birth, but are also institutionalized in terms of biases defining what is and isn’t news. Second, reliance on the observable fact results in dominance of events over processes, which necessarily favors institutions able to control events or stage “pseudo-events” and ignores more complicated and slippery issues of context and implications. Third, the constraints of newsgathering, in which reporters become tools of news sources, means that “fact” is whatever an official says it is. Attribution of “fact” to an official source is a means of self-protection against mistakes and criticism in the guise of objective reporting that relegates reporters to the role of stenographers who do little more than to regurgitate the party line du jour, thus absolving themselves both of blame and of responsibility.

Journalism at the end of the 20th century has taken these traits to their extremes, watering down the New York Times’ credo of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” into “All the News That’s Safe and Easy” (and profitable). Although all journalists would say they subscribe to the Hutchins Commission enunciation of a journalistic social responsibility, in which facts are reported in a context that gives them meaning, such is very seldom the case. On the one hand, reporters recognize that they cannot be mere conduits of pure facts flowing from the world to readers and listeners; at the same time, however, “facts” as defined by official statements, quotes on the record and “pseudo-events” — interviews, press conferences, speeches — are safe and easy news to report. Taking the first half of that statement, “objectivity” is largely out of vogue and the revisionist definition of the reporter’s function (“What we meant was balanced, fair and even-handed.”) acknowledges some of the criticisms suggested above. Individuals are accepted as having their own selective perceptions of the world around them, perceptions developed through their individual backgrounds, socio-economic status, upbringing and development.

Generally, acknowledgement of the inevitable bias that results from individual perceptions is the best that journalists can expect; since individuals see the world differently, then, objective reporting becomes balanced reporting based not on one’s own judgments of relative importance of fact but on someone else’s assessments. This is the journalistic equivalent of political deniability mentioned at the outset: Since I know my own perceptions to be skewed, let’s take information direct from the horse’s mouth, thus avoiding any appearance that my own prejudices have slanted the story in transit from the world to the reader. The point that this “safety” measure misses — beyond the obvious biases of the official source — is that selection of which information to hear, which source to use, which of his or her statements to include in reporting and which to discard, are also biased decisions. Although they are decisions made with the intention of impartiality, they are no less skewed and much less honest than those of a reporter who applies his or her own critical processes to events and interprets them for the reader in the context of other facts. More of a threat than issues of personal selectivity — if not to some ideal of presenting facts about the world to the audience, then to the entire democratic process and the press’s function in it — is that there are woefully few ideas left in the media marketplace of ideas. Reliance on official sources and staged “events” to the exclusion of critical evaluation and reporting in meaningful context may have reached an all-time high (or low) in the 1988 presidential campaign, with the press and the electorate at the mercy of candidate handlers’ and spin-doctors’ sanctioned sound bites, photo ops and scheduled appearances. Although that issue is more correctly one of press performance and not of objectivity per se, the press’s co-optation by its near-exclusive reliance on repeated posed and cynical images of giant American flags, candidates in tanks and meaningless sloganism (“Read my lips.” “The L word.” “A thousand points of light.”) raised the same fears for the democratic process that had been voiced in the 1940s and ’50s. Despite acknowledgement of the inevitability of individual subjectivity in the newsgathering process and journalistic lip-service to social responsibility theory, the fact of press performance in the 1990s is still adherence to the practices developed when objectivity was the goal. Reported “facts” are not truth about the world but accepted as gospel because they come from an official source. Interpretation is rejected for fear of going too far out on a limb and appearing to lose the guise of journalistic impartiality.

Thus, the press of the 1990s seems to have gotten stuck somewhere between Lippmann’s third stage — commercial press driven by market pressures — and a still-illusive fourth stage — a “professional” press unswayed by external influences. Stage 3.5 is one in which journalists — and their customers in the marketplace of ideas — are driven almost exclusively by both market and source pressures to the exclusion of anything like the ideal of objectivity — reliance on fact — and wholly untainted by the murky waters of critical evaluation, interpretation and independent appraisal of the world.

See Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. (New York: Basic Books, 1978).