ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses how the objectivity standard became the dominant norm in modern journalism, even while most working reporters and nearly all scholars acknowledge that a strict version of it cannot be achieved. This means that all news providers can only approach their work from a normative and political perspective; all are, that is, “biased”. By the mid-1800s the economics of newspapers shifted, as publishers started printing dailies and sought wider audiences and the advertisers needed to fund increased expenses. The extraordinary advances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ scientific revolution began to bear fruit in the nineteenth. By the early 1900s the standard had been largely established as the journalistic norm. At the same time, formal professionalisation was occurring in other fields like medicine and the law, where they used education, accreditation, and credentialing standards as a means for distinguishing the pros from the wannabes.
