ABSTRACT
The tension that has often existed between the study and the practice of journalism has been felt perhaps most sharply in the discussion of objectivity. Traditionally a core tenet of journalistic professionalism, the idea of objectivity has been subjected to unremitting attack by academic critics of news and journalism. ‘It must surely be self evident that objectivity is, and has always been, a meaningless concept’, asserts one British journalism professor, for instance, describing even the aspiration to objectivity as ‘dangerous’ (Gaber 2008). Similarly, Keith Woods, Dean of Faculty at the prestigious US Poynter Institute, declares bluntly that he is ‘not a believer in the myth of objectivity’ (quoted in Strupp 2008). Today, however, such critics are behind the times. The critique has long since become the orthodoxy: not only is there a consensus against objectivity among scholars of Journalism Studies, but journalists themselves have internalised the critique and often seem unwilling or unable to offer a robust defence of what was once a defining ethic of the profession. In the mid-1990s, the Society of Professional Journalists dropped the term ‘objectivity’ from its code of ethics, for example (Mindich 1998: 5); around the same time, BBC war correspondent Martin Bell confessed that he was ‘no longer sure what “objective” means’ (Bell 1998: 18). While scholarly disdain for journalistic objectivity is now so well entrenched that it is almost impossible, in academic discourse, to use the term ‘objectivity’ without scare quotes, in practice the concept has been so eroded that the critique has become, at best, redundant. The first part of this chapter reviews the main criticisms of objectivity in jour-
nalism, explaining what objectivity is thought to entail and highlighting the different sorts of doubts that have been raised about it. These doubts are of broadly two types. On the one hand, journalism is criticised for failing to achieve objectivity: the latter is seen as a desirable end, but critics try to identify the factors that impede its realisation. On the other hand, objectivity is sometimes held to be impossible or illusory, and journalism’s claim to achieve it is denounced as necessarily false. The chapter then seeks to put the concept of objectivity into historical perspective, looking at how it emerged as such a key idea for journalism. It is important to see the rise of objectivity in social and historical context if we are to understand both its limits in the past and its possibilities in the future, though we should also bear in mind that, for many of the critics who have traced
the historical emergence of journalistic objectivity, the purpose of doing so was to call it into question. By historicising objectivity, the aim was often to put it at some critical distance – as an idea that could and should be scrutinised and disputed rather than an eternal, taken-for-granted feature of journalism. Yet just as the concept of journalistic objectivity has a history, so too does
the critique. Rather than a set of timeless truths, the critique of objectivity also needs to be seen in context. The third section therefore examines the critique of objectivity in more detail, discussing its emergence against the background of wider social and political developments. The critique that Journalism Studies has inherited (from its antecedents in Media and Cultural Studies and sociology) was forged in circumstances that no longer exist. Debates about political bias in news reporting, for example, often seem to hark back to a past era of clashing ideologies and competing world views that bears little resemblance to our own times. Today the most salient fact about the reporting of politics is that – judging by criteria such as voter turnout in elections or membership of political parties – fewer and fewer people seem to be interested.1 It is our contention that in today’s circumstances, when revelations of ‘media bias’ are more likely to reinforce popular cynicism than to prompt critical thought, the critique of objectivity no longer makes sense. In conclusion, we consider why journalism has internalised the critique and suggest that, in questioning or abandoning a commitment to objectivity, recent forms of journalism do not offer an improvement on the past.
Objectivity in journalism is a complex idea, used to refer to at least three distinct, though interrelated, concepts. First, it primarily entails a commitment to truthfulness : reporting factually accurate information. Second, objectivity is often thought to imply neutrality in the sense of fairness and balance: seeking to be impartial and unbiased in the process of reporting and, where there are conflicting interpretations of an event, presenting different viewpoints even-handedly. Third, objectivity is also often understood to imply neutrality in the sense of emotional detachment : a dispassionate approach that separates fact from comment and allows news audiences to make up their minds about events rather than being offered a journalist’s own response. These are interrelated in that – at least in theory – journalists are dispassionate and neutral so as not to let their own emotional responses and political allegiances get in the way of reporting truthfully. The normative ideals to which journalism traditionally aspires – truthfulness,
fairness, detachment – appear to some critics as impossible to achieve just because of human fallibility. Ivor Gaber’s contention, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that the claim to objectivity is ‘meaningless’, for example, rests on the simple observation that ‘journalists […] are human beings’:
