Objectivity and Journalism
A Plea and A Reading List
Debates over objectivity in journalism and exactly what journalists should strive for in the pursuit of truth are far from new, but instead of having increasingly nuanced and practical discussions that advance our understanding and improve our practices, we remain stuck in an endless loop.
Threatened by critiques of the status quo, objectivity’s defenders lash out again and again against the same straw men, claiming that their critics don’t believe in facts and are intent on pursuing their own personal agendas. I do not know any serious critics of objectivity who believe in abandoning independence altogether and focusing narrowly on one point of view; rather, they advocate for continuously interrogating how systems of power and personal biases affect our understanding of reality and how we report on it.
Human beings have always wrestled with the nature of truth and how we know what we know. From ancient philosophers to theologians to scientists to academics from every discipline, we have grappled with questions such as whether truth comes from a god or the scientific method or how much any individual is even capable of seeing beyond the lens formed from their own personal experiences and knowledge. There are centuries of rich writings and research and debates around these and similar questions, but so often the discussion in journalism seems devoid of any context or history: it is black and white, all or nothing.
The pursuit of truth in journalism will always be complex and ill-suited to an objective/subjective binary because human beings and the truth itself is constantly changing as we accumulate more knowledge, interact with each other and evolve. We need to throw out this binary and accept that we can’t create a set of rigid rules or norms around objectivity, but instead, journalists are going to have to be transparent and thoughtful about everything they do. We need to recognize the ways in which traditional norms and routines of objectivity do and do not serve us, depending on the circumstances; journalists do need guidelines to prevent influence from powerful factions seeking to sway us, but we also wield tremendous power in ways that have often harmed communities throughout history because of the uncritical application of these guidelines in situations in which they may not apply. For example, showing your story to a source pre-publication to check accuracy is very different if it’s a powerful official or CEO as opposed to a person in a more vulnerable position who could be put at risk.
The best way to see objectivity in journalism is as a process for verifying information, not as a characteristic of an individual person. But many of its defenders seem unwilling to grapple with the myriad ways in which that process can fail, especially when journalists don’t do the hard work of examining how their unconscious assumptions affect those processes and the choices they make. Aside from a handful of Internet trolls, critics of objectivity make it very clear that they still value rigorous reporting, curiosity, open inquiry, and independence from political parties and corporations.
It is hard to embrace complexity over certainty. It can be frustrating. But it’s not impossible and it’s long overdue.
My main suggestions for journalists who want to grapple with objectivity with more nuance and care are two-fold. One, it’s about continually asking yourself a series of questions. Whose voices are you leaving out? Whose voices are you centering? Have you made any unconscious assumptions about the people or issues in your story? How can you be transparent about your method and approach? Have you talked it over with someone with a different perspective or lived experience or identity than you?
Two, *DO THE READING* Take the time — it matters. Particularly if you are a leader. Particularly if you plan to write and speak publicly about objectivity. If you have not done the reading and taken the time to review what countless people before you have thought and studied about objectivity, your ideas are going to fall flat. I think it is very difficult to make straw man arguments if you’ve actually engaged in an honest way with critics of objectivity, and then perhaps we can begin to have more productive discussions that don’t simply lionize the status quo.
To that end, here is an annotated reading list of some objectivity readings that have been particularly meaningful to me. Obviously, it is not comprehensive, and it’s possible that I’ve simply forgotten some. Feel free to make additional suggestions.
The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity by Lewis Raven Wallace
This must-read will take you through history and show you in detail the countless ways in which what editors believed was “objective” news judgment resulted in reporting that was anything but, instead reifying existing power structures and causing harm to marginalized groups. For example, writing with detached neutrality about lynching upholds white supremacy; parroting police statements uncritically allows abuse of Black people by authorities to go unreported; arguing that coverage of LGBTQ+ people was irrelevant in mainstream news helped fuel violence and misunderstanding. However, so much for the straw man argument that critics of objectivity are intent in pursuing a particular agenda without regard to facts or dissent: Wallace is clear about the importance of rigorous reporting, verification, and independence from political parties, corporations, and financial conflicts of interest. Instead, Wallace argues for radical transparency, curiosity, and becoming more conscious of the kinds of choices we make that frame issues in a particular way. There is also a complimentary podcast.
A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists and A Test of the News by Wesley Lowery
The first piece was the talk of Journalism Twitter in the summer of 2020 as Lowery laid out a challenge to newsroom leaders that don’t recognize that “neutral ‘objective journalism’ is constructed atop a pyramid of subjective decision-making.” As he writes, “conversations about objectivity, rather than happening in a virtuous vacuum, habitually focus on predicting whether a given sentence, opening paragraph or entire article will appear objective to a theoretical reader, who is invariably assumed to be white.” Social platforms gave individual journalists of color like Lowery an opportunity to publicly challenge editors in ways that weren’t previously possible. He argues: “Instead of promising our readers that we will never, on any platform, betray a single personal bias — submitting ourselves to a life sentence of public thoughtlessness — a better pledge would be an assurance that we will devote ourselves to accuracy, that we will diligently seek out the perspectives of those with whom we personally may be inclined to disagree and that we will be just as sure to ask hard questions of those with whom we’re inclined to agree.” Lowery expands on his argument in the second piece, noting the tendency of objectivity’s supporters to “spend their time slaying straw men, shouting in passionate defense of principles that are not in fact under dispute.” He offers six principles to stand by, including a devotion to rigor, a commitment to fairness, valuing context, practicing transparency, exploring nuance, and seeking clarity.
Objectivity Is a Privilege Afforded to White Journalists by Pacinthe Mattar
Mattar talks about her experiences as a journalist of color and how “our professionalism is questioned when we report on the communities we’re from, and the specter of advocacy follows us in a way that it does not follow many of our white colleagues.” Matter has the receipts to show how her editors often deferred to police narratives, and how the responsibility often falls “on the Only Ones in the Room to guarantee a spectrum of experiences and stories in news coverage and to point out where coverage misses the mark,” a heavy and difficult task.
News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media Juan González and Jose Torres. This book is dense with historical detail on American media and the many ways in which journalists actively participated in, tacitly condoned or yes, fought racial oppression. It also describes the Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalists who fought to create the alternative press. What was most remarkable to me was how much of this book was new to me, someone with an undergraduate degree, Master’s and PhD in journalism, which I think is an indictment not just of the education I received but the tendency of journalism to oversubscribe to its own mythologies around crusading for good and glossing over the ways in which we have done harm to communities. Yes, there are examples of how journalism has played a critical role in our democracy and in advancing progress to equity, but by not studying the bad parts of our history as well, we are, as the cliche goes, doomed to repeat them.
Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. This book lays out the core principles and practices of journalism based on extensive research with citizens, scholars, and journalists themselves. I’m a bit biased here as I worked for the authors in the early aughts when we led trainings at newsrooms across the country to discuss how newsrooms could better uphold these principles in their daily work. It explains that objectivity can be seen not as a quality of an individual journalist but a method by which they can test the accuracy of information and present it to audiences in a transparent way so that people can decide for themselves what to think. It advocates admitting what you don’t know instead of trying to write around it and creating good communication in newsrooms so that everyone is free to exercise their conscience and share their lived experiences to check assumptions. This understanding of objectivity links it with the scientific method and roots it in a discipline of verification and humility about the limitations of our knowledge. (The link here is a brief summary, but you should get the book).
The View from Nowhere: Questions and Answers by Jay Rosen
Jay Rosen has long been using the apt term “view from nowhere” to describe journalists’ “attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view” because they think it gives them authority. “Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position ‘impartial,’” he writes. Drawing upon the philosopher Thomas Nagel, Rosen explains that humans can step back and transcend their individual viewpoints, but there will always be limits to our ability to do so. His Twitter/X feed is full of examples of journalists employing the “view from nowhere” and the dangers of doing so.
How Journalists Engage by Sue Robinson
Sue makes a provocative argument that restoring trust in journalism will not mean trying to double down on neutrality but instead, “Through caregiving and care receiving, journalists could set aside the mantle of objectivity and mandated critical distance that I believe inhibits true connection to communities in favor of the offering of a moral voice that is highly aware and appreciative of identities as well as the explicit expression of desire to help communities solve problems and have productive discussions.” She also offers a useful list of skill sets and strategies that journalists need to learn to successfully engage communities. She writes: “I can get closer to the truth if I call out my identities that will influence how I approach the story and constantly interrogate them as I report. Fairness, too, may be a lovely idea, but in reality we should commit instead to equity. In equity, every person is allotted the conditions of reporting that they need, as opposed to equality, when all sources are treated the same, as if no power dynamics were present.”
Networked News and Racial Divides also by Sue Robinson
In this book, Sue looks at the significant achievement disparities in education in the progressive city of Madison, WI, and how local media and other information flows in the community played a role in perpetuating this inequity. By breaking down in detail how objectivity as practiced reinforces the status quo through the lens of a specific case study in a modern, digital context, Sue makes it easy to understand the ways in which even well-intentioned efforts to avoid bias produce other forms of it. Her own critical self-reflection as a researcher and former journalist sets a useful example and the tips for journalists who want to do better coverage, particularly of controversial local issues involving race, are valuable.
Pathfinding by Jody Porter (Thanks to Pacinthe Mattar for suggesting!) This is a heartrending but beautiful story the late journalist Jody Porter on how she learned that writing about other people’s pain can be a way of hiding from your own. I can’t really sum this one up in any way, you just have to read it.
Night of the Gun by David Carr. Not about objectivity directly, but this reported memoir by the late New York Times journalist vividly and intimately shows the limits of our own memories. Even when we experience something directly, our understanding of all of its dimensions is limited and changes over time. If it can be hard to ascertain the truth even when we have lived it, much less when we are trying to understand things that have happened to others.
Note: I deliberately included some classic older works below, even though some of the details and some of the language is clearly quite out of date, to show that there is a long and rich tradition of research and thinking about how objectivity operates in newsrooms, and that more than you might think remains unchanged today.
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The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond by Stephen Ward.
This is an academic book so it is not as accessible as some of the other readings, but Ward’s concept of “pragmatic objectivity” nicely threads the needle between the hubris of believing objectivity is fully achievable and giving up on the possibility of ever ascertaining any form of truth. Some of my favorite quotes: “The pragmatist is an imperfectionist, poised between naïve idealism and cynical despair;” “Pragmatic objectivity is a passionate commitment to dispassionate inquiry;” “Social truth is a temporary resting place in an endless debate under changing circumstances.”
Just the Facts: How “Objectivity”Came to Define American Journalism by David Mindich
The history of what Mindich calls journalism’s supreme deity, objectivity, includes many examples that form depressing parallels to debates still raging today. In the 1890s, The New York Times generally covered lynching in a “balanced” way, as though there were two legitimate opposing views. The journalist Ida B. Wells responded to this by investigating each lynching case, time after time finding that the claim that Black men were lynched because they raped white women was manufactured and the men were innocent. The New York Times, Mindich writes, saw her as “outside the Times ‘rational’ sphere of discussion, and she was associated with emotionality and dogmatism” even though she carefully supported her arguments with facts, including statistics she got from white-owned papers. When a British committee was formed to combat lynching, “the Times fumed in an editorial that ‘it is especially to be deplored that it should take this action at the insistence of a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress, who does not scruple to represent the victims of black brutes in the South as willing victims.”
Objectivity as strategic ritual: An examination of newsmen’s notions of objectivity. By Gaye Tuchman
As you might note from the word “newsmen” in the title, this article is from 1972. But Tuchman broke ground more than 50 years ago by observing journalists at work at a newspaper and documenting the importance of daily routines and norms that help journalists get work done and assemble facts on deadline. More importantly, she showed how powerful these routines are in shaping reality and what kinds of stories are more likely to get covered — then and now. For example, because they had a lot of space to fill on a daily basis, she found that editors are likely to deploy reporters to places that can be expected to generate a steady flow of news and with people who are generally willing to talk to them. She observed that objectivity functioned primarily as a set of procedures that protect journalists from criticism. Even long before Tuchman, Warren Breed’s 1955 research showed that journalists write for their bosses and/or their peers.
This 1979 classic identified some of the implicit values that shape American journalism by influencing the selection of sources and stories. They include: ethnocentrism (upper-class, white male bias), altruistic democracy (politicians should serve the public good and the United States is a meritocracy), responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism (romanticizing the rural — think of all the stories about “regular folks!” in a diner in Iowa), individualism, and moderatism. Gans found that the journalists he studied assumed, without much if any critical reflection, that these values were universal and dominant.
Manufacturing the News by Mark Fishman This 1980 ethnography of a newsroom argues that journalists reinforce the status quo through their reliance on bureaucratic sources — elected officials, police officers, military personnel, government agency staff, and the like. These sources are the “normative order of authorized knowers in the society” — in essence, people whose job it is to know certain things — and they are generally accessible on deadline. News that emerges outside of these bureaucratic structures is much less likely to get reported.
Mediating the message: Theories of influences on mass media content. Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese. This 1996 book offers a nice research overview, including some highlights from some of the books on this list. The news we see is influenced by 1)Individual reporters & editors 2)Media routines (the repeated practices reporters use to ensure some level of predictability in their work and help them decide what is or isn’t a story worth doing) 3)Media organizations (this can include hiring/promotion patterns, internal structure, formal and informal authority e.g. executive editor vs. star columnist, internal politics) 4)External influences (sources, people in public relations, peers, advertisers, the target audience, government) 5)Ideological (journalists are influenced by the larger systems of ideas in the societies they live in and this influences how they define situations and label some groups as outside of the mainstream.)
The objectivity norm in American Journalism by Michael Schudson. “Objectivity” as a concept in American journalism grew with the invention of the telegraph and concomitant economic pressures that favored news delivered with brevity in a manner that larger, further-flung audiences wouldn’t find objectionable. However, Schudson argues those historical developments were less important than the development of journalism as a profession. Objectivity as a set of rigorous practices was not only a way to defend journalism against critics but also evidence that not everyone could do it; it required a level of expertise and training. As people became more reliant on science to understand the world around them, journalists sought a more scientific method of producing news in order to gain status and trust. (Note: Schudson has other relevant work; see his book Discovering the News.)
The Whole World is Watching by Todd Gitlin. This study of how news organizations portrayed the Vietnam protest group Students for a Democratic Society was incredibly eye opening to me when I first read it as a young graduate student. By showing how the protesters were portrayed as deviant in news stories, it illustrated how the media can suppress dissent, reinforce the status quo, and change the strategies and composition of activist groups themselves. At the time, I was a Penn student interning with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board and the Republican National Convention was held in Philly that summer. I saw phrases that were nearly exactly the same as the one Gitlin described in the Inquirer’s accounts of protests during the convention. Interestingly, when I interviewed reporters and editors, they argued that Vietnam protesters had much greater legitimacy. The parallels felt almost eerie to me as someone new to the study of journalism.
Journalistic Authority by Matt Carlson
This 2017 book examines the question: Where does journalism derive its authority, or its “right to be listened to?” Carlson argues that authority is not an intrinsic quality of any particular journalist, news organization or story but rather is product of continuous effort by journalists to establish expertise through norms and practices and access to elite sources. He notes that many journalists are not naive about the limits of objectivity but cling to it as part of their identities because it serves as a defense from critics and is a key aspect of the professionalism of the field.
From Milton to McLuhan: The Ideas Behind American Journalism by J. Herbert Altschull
“One of the chief purposes of this book is to demonstrate that American journalists, in their pursuit of facts, do indeed have a philosophy, a professional philosophy,” Altschull writes. A former reporter and editor for the Associated Press, The New York Times, and more, he argues that it is practical for journalists to understand the views and oft-unexamined cultural assumptions about the world that shape their practices, because it will make their work more accurate and complete and help them better understand the motivations of their sources as well. The book traces the philosophies that have influenced American journalism, beginning with the ideas developed during the English and French Enlightenment that inspired American revolutionaries. The book would benefit, in my opinion, from taking a more critical lens on these philosophical traditions and how they were applied in ways that did not advance equality or freedom but often the opposite; nevertheless, it helps uncover the ideas that helped to form many of the profession’s norms.
This book argues that “investigative journalists are custodians of public conscience.” These are stories that implicitly demand a response from the public and public officials — impact! — and call upon “us, as a society, to decide what is, and what is not, an outrage to our sense of moral order.” While it grounds investigative reporting in rigorous fact checking and a high burden of proof and makes it clear that journalists are not moral arbiters of behavior, it posits that news judgments about what is important are also about what is right.
I’ll leave you with this quote, from Lewis Raven Wallace
“One of my deepest beliefs, one of the practices I value the most, is admitting what we don’t know — allowing our minds to swim in the questions, to be submerged. If autocracy and racism and fake news foreclose imagination and colonize doubt, I believe curiosity lies at the center of a framework for resistance that cultivates imagination, that cultivates the skill of living in questions. And when journalists offer this to the world — the attitude of not knowing, and of endlessly seeking to know more — I think we can gain the power to change it. When we foreclose imagination and curiosity, foreclose fierce analysis in favor of feigned objectivity, we sacrifice that power — feeding, instead, into cynicism and indifference. Truth isn’t truth, so what’s the point? This is just the way things are, people say, and then they change the channel, click back to puppy pictures on Facebook.”
