"Objective Journalism" Has Always Been a Myth

[Muda69]

https://mises.org/wire/objective-journalism-has-always-been-myth

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One of the great myths of modern journalism is that it is possible for journalists to report facts and make judgments in an objective manner. This myth has come under increasing attack in recent years as the mass media's continued hostility to the Trump administration has become ever more fevered. Nevertheless, many both inside and outside the profession cling to the idea that "objective" reporting is possible.

We hear about this ideal frequently from journalists themselves — not surprisingly — who fancy themselves as investigators and researchers who are above ordinary human biases. Instead, they merely communicate information, making it digestible for the common man, and telling the reader all the most important information about a topic.

This idea dates back at least as far as the 1920s, and is often attributed to Walter Lippmann who explains this ideal of objective journalism at length in his 1922 book Public Opinion.1

The problem begins with an ignorant citizenry, which requires "objective" arbiters of information. Lippmann concludes, as summarized by Jørn Henrik Petersen,

the general citizenry had neither the time, the ability nor the inclination to inform itself on important questions. Society was too complex, the power of stereotypes too great, man’s immediate environment toodominant. The remedy – at least in Lippmann – had to be boards of experts who could distill the evidence and offer the residue facts

"Since the real effect of most laws are subtle and hidden," Lippmann contends, "they cannot be understood by filtering local experiences through local states of mind. They can be known only by controlled reporting and objective analysis."

But how is this "objective analysis" to be achieved? The answer for Lippman lies in making journalism more scientific, and in making facts "fixed, objectified, measured, [and] named."

It is not a coincidence, of course, that Lippmann is writing this in the early 1920s. This was the late Progressive Era, and as such it was the age of "scientific motherhood" and an endless society-wide drive to convince Americans to hand over all important decisions to "experts." Consequently, mothers were to abandon control to parenting "experts," parents were to hand over their prerogatives of educating children "experts," and the economy was to be controlled by "experts" in public policy.

Journalism historian Richard Streckfuss notes that Lippmann was jumping on the same bandwagon:

Lippmann’s use of the words objective, science, and scientific are significant. Adapting scientific methods for human affairs – including journalism – was central to the thought of the decade.

Lippmann's influence on the profession's aspirations has never really waned. To this day, the Lippmann model leads to continued efforts at greater opbjectivity inluding the promotion of methods like "precision journalism," popularized by Philip Meyer. Meyer notes that journalists often stray from the Lippmannian ideal, largely due to the difficulty of collecting information. Meyer believes the solution to this

is to push journalism toward science, incorporating both the powerful data-gathering and -analysis tools of science and its disciplined search for verifiable truth.

This ideal remains quite popular among journalists. They continue to fancy themselves as experts at providing objective and balanced information on critical pieces of information and as the only ones who can be trusted with providing an unbiased viewpoint.

Not Even Scientists Are Objective

This philosophy, however, is faulty even at its most basic foundation. Lippmann, as a proponent of scientific objectivity was himself embracing a fanciful idea of scientific inquiry and objectivity. This view that the physical sciences were above bias was almost universal in Lippmann's day. But in recent decades, numerous cracks have shown up in the facade of scientific objectivity among even physical scientists. Thanks to the research in the fields of the "sociology of science" and the "economics of science," there is increasing documentation illustrating what should have been obvious all along — namely that scientists are not immune to the effects of their own personal biases.

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On the other hand, scientists have a better claim to objectivity than journalists. In many fields, scientists are constrained by whether or not their scientific knowledge is actually useful. Prescription drugs either work or they don't. New building materials and new chemical solutions either work or their don't.

Many physical scientists are thus limited in how they might indulge their biases by the successful application of their discoveries and conclusions.

Journalism, of course, has no such check on its own work, and thus we see the fundamental flaw in Lippmann's attempt at making journalism "scientific." There's no practical measure of whether or not a news story has been communicated scientifically or not.

Journalists Increasingly Admitting Objectivity Is Unattainable

Thanks to journalism's profound and obvious hostility to the Trump administration, it has become increasingly difficult for the media to continue to claim it enbraces as Lippmann model of dispassionate scientific inquiry.

This departure from the scientific ideal has become so clear in the last decade, in fact, that even mainstream journalists have started to openly discuss it.

For example, in 2015, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone authored an op-ed in The New York Times titled "'Objective Journalism' Is an Illusion." Taibbi was writing on the occasion of the retirement of John Stewart from The Daily Show and contended that part of Stewart's popularity could be explained by the fact Stewart did not pretend to be an objective journalist. Unlike most journalists who hide behind a facade of objectivity, Stewart was upfront about his biases.

Although many journalists are still in denial about this, the overwhelming majority of those who consume media are well aware that biases are rampant, from all directions. Thus Taibbi concludes:

We live in a society now where people want to know who a journalist is before they decide whether or not to believe his or her reporting.

Trying to hide one's bias is thus only courting suspicion from readers.

Others have departed from the ideal of objective journalism as a means of defending the mass media's lopsided hostility to the Trump administration. This is partly why Rob Wijnberg at The Correspondent concludesthat "'not taking a position' means being not only a mouthpiece for power but a conduit for lies." Wijnberg abandons the ideal of objective journalism because, for him, that means going too easy on the forces of evil. It's better to emphatically oppose the bad guys (i.e., Donald Trump) rather than be limited some some arcane ideal of scientific reporting.

Whatever the agendas of Taibbi and Wijnberg might be, they're more honest about the realities of journalism than the powerful talking heads at CNN or Foxnews who would have us believe objectivity is possible in journalism.Regardless of one's political leaning, variations on the slogan "We Report. You Decide" have always been based on fantasy.

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Thus has it always been. This isn't to say that no journalists have tried to be objective. Many have. And many have thought they have achieved objectivity. But the realities of framing and agenda-setting mean that even those who attempt objectivity are bound to fail.

Indeed, the real scandal here may not be the fact that many journalists continue to indulge their entrenched ideological biases while claiming to be objective. Perhaps the real problem, all along, has the been the fact that so many Americans have been so gullible as to even entertain the notion that the information they receive through the news media is objective or free of bias. Nowadays, it's extremely difficult to believe there was ever really a time that Americans watched the networks' evening news and went away thinking "golly gee whiz! I guess I now have an even-handed purely factual re-telling of the world's events!" In the age of Walter Cronkite, it's possible some people thought that way. Hopefully, those days are over.

An interesting perspective from Mr. McMaken.