Abstract
This study explores how journalists in the United States advocated for a stronger affirmation of social justice in journalism following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Analyzing the metajournalistic discourse in trade publications (Niemanlab, Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter) and on the web, this study traces how journalists and commentators challenged the professional norm of journalistic objectivity. In particular, it examines how journalistic objectivity became identified as a problematic concept, what journalists were suggesting as its alternative, and how the journalistic establishment responded. This study identifies three dimensions of criticisms and connects these to disagreements within specific modalities of journalistic objectivity (procedural, ethical, ideological). Ultimately, this analysis locates an ideological struggle in which fundamental moral norms of journalism are not only being vigorously contested but also rearticulated and renegotiated.
The summer of 2020 was a season of racial reckoning for journalism in the United States. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in the streets of Minneapolis 1 and the ensuing protests against police brutality, systemic racism and racial injustice, journalists of color were speaking out against institutional racism in their own industry (Farhi and Ellison, 2020). At The New York Times staff members protested the publication of an op-ed piece by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas, in which he called for “sending in the troops” to deal with protests in cities across the country. Ultimately, opinion editor James Bennet had to resign. At the Philadelphia Inquirer, staff denounced their paper for publishing the headline “Buildings Matter, Too.” In a letter to their management they wrote, “We’re tired of shouldering the burden of dragging this 200-year-old institution kicking and screaming into a more equitable age.” Consequently, executive editor Stan Wischnowski had to step down and the paper pledged to become an “anti-racist” newspaper. At The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, two Black reporters spoke out against their paper, arguing that they were both prevented from covering protests against racism and police violence because they were deemed not to be impartial. And at Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, employees of color publicly complained about racism in the workforce. As Dorothy Tucker, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) stated, in newsrooms all across the country there were “firestorms” going on with many of the association’s members telling their predominantly white managers: “enough is enough” (NPR, 2020).
A particularly contested issue in many of these debates was the role of objectivity as dominant occupational norm in U.S. journalism and its systematic blind spots when it comes to covering racial and ethnic issues. “Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago from an openly partisan press to a model of professed objectivity,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery (2020) wrote in a consequential op-ed article for The New York Times, “the mainstream has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses.” The op-ed triggered a widely circulated rebuke from Tom Rosenstiel, the executive director of the American Press Institute, who offered a defense of objectivity in a series of 22 tweets on Twitter [Rosenstiel, 2020; see below]).
Journalistic objectivity has been under scrutiny for several decades (Mindich, 1998) and the critical evaluation of knowledge claims across the social sciences and humanities is not a recent phenomenon either (Novick, 1988; Daston and Galison, 2007). In U.S. journalism, however, objectivity has so far remained the “chief occupational value” (Schudson, 2001) even though journalistic genres like contextual, analytical, or narrative journalism have raised “the professional bar of what it means to be an objective journalist” (Anderson and Schudson, 2019: 142; see also Schmidt, 2021). At the same time, alternatives to mainstream journalism that focus on minorities and social justice have been characterized as advocacy journalism in contrast to objective journalism (Nishikawa et al., 2009; Waisbord, 2009). In this vein, scholars of the Black Press highlighted the negative impact of the professional norm of objectivity. “Requiring Black journalists who work at mainstream outlets to write objectively is in essence a mandate to erase their cultural perspective and forgo the non-white lens that is usually needed in order to provide more nuanced coverage.” (Williams Fayne, 2021: 3) As much as this tension between objective journalism and advocacy has been present for decades, it was during the social justice protests in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd that issues of journalistic objectivity as both a normative ideal and as an everyday practice were brought to the forefront of metajournalistic (Carlson 2016) discourse. “This outcry across the news industry,” (Usher 2021: 56) observed, “was perhaps the most direct moment that legacy newsrooms have had in decades, when an open discussion of racism in the newsroom broke through not just to journalists but to a wider, national audience.”
In this article, then, I will focus on analyzing how journalistic objectivity became identified as a problematic concept, what journalists are suggesting as its alternative, and how the journalistic establishment responded to these challenges. My analysis offers a typology of criticisms outlining how critics of objectivity mobilize arguments in three distinct dimensions. From their perspective, journalistic objectivity (1) fails to account for subjectivity, (2) it fails to acknowledge social inequities and collective trauma of marginalized groups, and (3) it fails to address concealed power structures. Based on these findings I argue that the debate around objectivity, as contradictory and ambivalent as it may appear, actually reveals profound disagreements about the normative ideals underlying U.S. journalism. In fact, I find that these fissures point towards an ideological struggle in which fundamental moral norms of journalism are not only being vigorously contested but also rearticulated and renegotiated.
Objectivity in journalism
The study of objectivity, including its evolution and its tenets, stretches across disciplines, academic traditions, and cultural boundaries. The following literature review will focus on objectivity in a disciplinary sense, foregrounding “not universal criteria of validity but particular, yet still authoritative, disciplinary criteria” (Megill, 1994: 5) in the context of journalism and journalism studies. First, I will evaluate different conceptions of journalistic objectivity including the glaring omission of not incorporating the role of the African American press. Then I will address scholarly criticism of journalistic objectivity, especially in connection to the representation of historically marginalized communities in the United States.
Objectivity, as Michael Schudson (2001: 149) stated twenty years ago, “is the chief occupational value of American journalism and the norm that historically and still today distinguishes US journalism from the dominant model of continental European journalism” (where news and opinion are not always as clearly separated as in the United States). Its historical evolution of objectivity in the U.S. can be traced back to the 19th century (Kaplan, 2002; Schiller 1981; Schudson 1978) and scholars have identified commercial, professional, and political factors in shaping this process (see Maras, 2013). The occupational status of objectivity as procedural fairness solidified in the 1920s when journalists “developed loyalties more to their audiences and to themselves as an occupational community than to their publishers or their publishers’ favored political parties” (Schudson, 2001: 161).
In the context of journalism studies, objectivity has been studied from a variety of conceptual approaches and with diverse research agendas over the past decades. Definitions of journalistic objectivity may refer to a narrow set of reporting practices denoting a method of investigation that emphasizes impartial observation and the disinterested presentation of facts (Dennis and Merrill, 1984). More broadly, journalistic objectivity can be understood as an institutionalized formation of both values and practices (Schudson, 2018). A foundational characterization by Tuchman (1972) emphasized that objectivity was a strategic ritual that reporters collectively used to shield themselves and their practices against criticism. Schudson (2001: 149) conceptualized objectivity as an occupational norm, that is “at once a moral ideal, a set of reporting and editing practices and an observable pattern of news writing.” Furthermore, as much as journalistic objectivity is characterized by journalists’ sense of professionalism and occupational identity, it is intimately intertwined with expectations of media audiences as well as legitimizing rationales and rhetorical strategies of media owners (Hackett and Zhao, 1998: 8-9). It is also important to recognize that the concept of objectivity with its central role in US journalism might be conceptualized differently in other journalistic cultures (Maras, 2013).
Conspicuously absent in these analyses, however, is how a parallel journalism industry—that of the African American Press—evolved simultaneously yet with a different approach to its reporting. Because the Black press is one of “the most widely accessed black social institutions of the twentieth century” (Haywood, 2018: 6), this omission is quite glaring. As a range of scholars have demonstrated (e.g. Haywood, 2018; Washburn 2006), the African American Press developed on a parallel track with the white mainstream press—separate and unequal, but advocating for African Americans on a wide range of issues (Williams Fayne, 2020). While objectivity consolidated into an occupational norm for the white press in the early twentieth century, the concept “never caught on as well for black audiences,” noted Clarence Page, then a journalist for the Chicago Tribune (cit. in Washburn 2006: xi). “After all, despite their vaunted “objectivity,” the big white newspapers almost never covered black community news unless it involved crime or, in later years, sports,” he added (cit. in Washburn, 2006: xii). Even though the mainstream press began paying attention to the oppression of African Americans in the South in the 1960s (Roberts and Klibanoff, 2007), reporters of color remained critical of the press’ fixation on objectivity when, in their view, the practice mostly reflected the interests of the white middle class (Pressman, 2018: 155).
Analyzing the apology movement by newspapers expressing regret over their past coverage of African Americans, Staples (2020) noted “what news organizations once presented as “fair” and “objective” journalism was in fact freighted with the racist stereotypes that had been deployed to justify slavery.” He continued that this apology movement “lays out how the white press alienated generations of African Americans — many of whom still view the leading news outlets of the United States as part of a hostile ‘white media.’” Individual testimonies from Black journalists further illustrate how working in the news industry as member of a historically marginalized community challenges conventional understandings of journalistic objectivity and the role it plays in the daily production of news. As Jill Nelson, a former journalist of the Washington Post, wrote in her memoir reflecting on her time there in the 1980s: For most African-American [sic] journalists, working in the mainstream media entails a daily struggle with the notion of objectivity. Each day we are required to justify ourselves, our community, and our story ideas. The most successful of us refashion ourselves in the image of white men. (Nelson, 1993: 86)
In light of the evolution of the Black Lives Matter movement, Richardson (2020) examined tactics and strategies of Black activists who were fighting Black stereotypes in the news and crafting counternarratives to racist news frames. One of the key components she identified in what she calls this act of bearing witness is “an investigative editorial stance to advocate for African American civil rights” (Richardson, 2020: 7).
In addition to journalists of color, critical scholars have also identified objectivity as a problematic concept that contributed to marginalizing non-white journalists, excluding communities of color and concealing power structures that justify the status quo. “[O]bjectivity and other hegemonic practices,” (Robinson and Culver 2019: 378) argue, “have reified a system of White supremacy for a White community that traditional Western reporters are not only a part of, but reporting for and within.” What makes the hegemony of white journalism even more problematic is that it conceals its dominance, as Alamo-Pastrana and Hoynes (2020) contend. They point out how white mainstream journalism cast itself as universal with the norm of objectivity rendering “invisible the standpoint from which journalistic knowledge is produced” (Alamo-Pastrana and Hoynes, 2020: 77). As a result, then, professional journalism is using whiteness as a lens that defines and reproduces one particular racial identity as dominant, prioritizing coverage of white issues over those affecting people of color (Alamo-Pastrana and Hoynes, 2020; Jacobs, 2000; Williams Fayne, 2021). As Newkirk 2000: 4) argued, “the news continues to be firmly rooted in white ideology, which fosters a racial hierarchy that places blacks, and other minorities, below whites.”
Research Design
The research goal of this study is to examine how various actors in the U.S. journalism were discursively constructing “journalistic objectivity” in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing social justice protests. As much as the discontent with journalistic objectivity had been brewing in recent years, it was the singularity of events following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the ensuing social justice protests across the country that rekindled and amplified professional frustrations with journalistic objectivity as standard procedure in the production of news. I understand discourse “as a means of talking and writing and acting upon worlds” embedded in social-discursive practices that are “constrained or encouraged by more macro movements in the overarching social formation” (Candlin 1997: pviii). More specifically, this study is informed by the theoretical framework of “discursive institutionalism” (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017: 120), analyzing journalistic roles and identity as “structures of meaning that are discursively created, perpetuated, and contested.” In this context, “journalistic objectivity” can be viewed as a specific role orientation, that is a collective construct “of the institutional values, attitudes, and beliefs with regards to the position of journalism in society and, consequently, to the communicative ideals journalists are embracing in their work” (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017: 123).
To construct my sample for this qualitative discourse analysis, I searched for the term “objectivity” in three major journalistic trade publications (Niemanlab, Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter) by using the advanced search function in Google. The search period stretched form May 25, 2020 (the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis) until the end of December 2020, yielding roughly one hundred results. To cast a wider net for the sample, I conducted snowball sampling and followed hyperlinks and other references pointing towards additional documents (e.g. podcasts by the Knight Foundation). When pertinent to the analysis (i.e. specific references to “objectivity”), these items were included as well. After discarding search results without connections between “objectivity” to the topic of social justice, my analysis ended up including 51 contributions by public actors in the journalistic field (journalists, media professionals, scholars). Analyzing the discursive construction of journalistic objectivity in 2020, then, this study illuminates a “key pivot point,” a moment “when discourse confronted cracks in the bases of journalistic authority” (Vos and Thomas, 2018: 2004).
Following an inductive analysis, I examined utterances in which journalistic actors defined, challenged or justified objectivity as a moral ideal for professional journalism. As themes were emerging in the collective discourse (Van Dijk, 1980), I began an iterative process of looking for normative and cognitive orientations that might indicate specific role conceptions (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017) relating to the topic of objectivity and social justice. Finally, I checked these conceptual clusters for referential adequacy (i.e., “checking preliminary findings and interpretations against archived raw data, previous literature and existing research to explore alternative explanations for findings as they emerge” [Erford, 2015: 102]). Ultimately, this analysis attempts to capture the specificity of the moment in the year 2020 and to extrapolate underlying dynamics that might indicate how journalistic routines and norms are being put to the test in the current circumstances. My analysis was guided by the following three research questions: RQ1: How do journalists challenge the professional norm of “journalistic objectivity” in relation to the coverage of social justice issues? RQ2: If journalists call for different journalistic ideals, how are these alternatives described? RQ3: How did the journalistic establishment respond to these challenges?
Findings
Before I present the findings of how journalists and media observers were discussing the state of journalistic objectivity in the summer and fall of 2020, it is important to note what Schiller (1981: 196) called the “polysemic” character of objectivity: “its universality as an ideal might shield open disparities in its application and interpretation.” Because of these disparities, journalists and others are typically using the same terms without noting or acknowledging that they are in fact using different conceptualizations of the term. As a result, they might be talking as much with each other as they are talking past each other. The goal, then, of examining these collective conversations about journalistic objectivity in 2020, is to disentangle these interpretations and elucidate any patterns.
Challenges to journalistic objectivity
In the following section, my analysis identifies three distinct conceptual dimensions that critics of journalistic objectivity were foregrounding in their arguments. From their perspective journalistic objectivity (1) fails to account for subjectivity, (2) it fails to acknowledge social inequities and collective trauma of marginalized groups, and (3) it fails to address concealed power structures.
We [...] know that neutral “objective journalism” is constructed atop a pyramid of subjective decision-making: which stories to cover, how intensely to cover those stories, which sources to seek out and include, which pieces of information are highlighted and which are downplayed. No journalistic process is objective. And no individual journalist is objective, because no human being is.
This criticism was echoed by journalist Jack Mirkinson (2020) who said that “the idea of what’s objective—what it means to be an ‘honest broker,’ to ‘play things straight,’ has always been....very subjective!” What this criticism emphasized is a particular aspect of the “strategic ritual of objectivity” when it is used to assert professional authority and fend off criticism by the public. In this case, the use of objectivity allegedly disguises potential personal biases, especially with regard to race. As Priska Neeley (2020) wrote, “Let’s do some internal reflection, wrestle with the fact that the white gaze is not the standard for objectivity.” Put differently, not only are journalists writing from a subjective perspective, the criticism goes, they are doing so by privileging a dominant white stance.
This relates to another double standard about which Black journalists expressed frustration. In several instances (e.g. at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as cited above) newsroom managers deemed journalists of color not capable to report about racial issues in a balanced way because they were personally affected and thus biased. When asked at a roundtable about this assumption that black journalists were biased, NABJ president Dorothy Tucker responded: “It really upsets me when anybody even raises that question because you don’t ask white journalists are they biased,” she said. “We’re professional, we do our jobs, we can cover any story, we can look at every angle.” (Knight Foundation, 2020)
Scholar Doug McLeod highlighted the role of specific framing strategies in perpetuating journalism’s inability to grapple with systematic racism and inequality. “As a result of journalistic conventions and the desire to demonstrate objectivity,” he noted, “most news stories about social protest are framed episodically rather than thematically. That is, it’s easier to maintain objectivity when you describe the events that occurred than it is to delve into the underlying issues and explanations of why things are occurring the way they are.” (McLeod, 2020)
Alternatives to objectivity
In light of these misgivings with conventional interpretations of journalistic objectivity, a number of journalists and actors in the journalistic field were articulating alternative moral ideals.
In his op-ed piece, Lowery (2020) called for “moral clarity” and urged journalists to “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.” His call was echoed by Masha Gessen (2020) who wrote that “moral clarity is a quest, guided by clear values and informed by facts and context, and clearly aligned with the original concept of journalistic objectivity.” In a similar vein, Wallace (2020) called for “values-based journalism that stands up to injustice.” Journalism educator Gina Baleria (2020) connected these calls to action to examples of prominent American journalists in the past who highlighted social ills and political obfuscation. “We need journalists not to be scared to bring a bit of activism to their work, as Johnson, Cronkite, Murrow and others have done,” she wrote. She also added that personal experiences of trauma and discrimination do not take away from someone’s ability to report on similar issues. Rather, these experiences might actually sensitize journalists to pursue stories of public interest. “Experiencing sexual harassment,” she noted, “can lead a reporter to pursue stories that bring suspected harassers and assaulters to justice. Being looked over or made to feel stupid in elementary school can lead a journalist to uncover systemic racism in a school district” (Baleria 2020).
At the Washington Post, media columnist Margaret Sullivan pondered the question of activism as a response to social justice protests. “I am enough of a traditionalist that I don’t like to see mainstream reporters acting like partisans — for example, by working on political campaigns,” she wrote. “But it’s more than acceptable that they should stand up for civil rights — for press rights, for racial justice, for gender equity and against economic inequality.” (Sullivan 2020) A reference to civil rights activism and the role of the media during its manifestations in the 1960s was also expressed in a newsletter from the Columbia Journalism Review after Congressman John Lewis, an icon of the civil rights era, passed away in July of 2020. Author Jon Alsop, 2020a cited a passage from Roberts and Klibanoff (2007) in which Lewis described journalists in the 1960s as “sympathetic referees.” Describing the role of the media, Lewis was quoted as saying, “If it hadn’t been for the media [...], the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings, a choir without a song” (Roberts and Klibanoff, 2007: 770).
In addition to “moral clarity,” a number of journalists and media professionals suggested a range of other alternatives to common notions of journalistic objectivity. Brent Cunningham (2020), the editor of the Food and Environment Reporting Network advocated for “intellectual honesty” (Cunningham, 2020). Heather Chaplin, the inaugural director of Journalism + Design at the New School, argued that caring for one’s community and focusing on literal truth should trump neutrality (Chaplin 2020). And Mark Lukasiewicz, Dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, was invoking values like “truth, honesty, responsibility,” arguing that “[p]erhaps we are all getting hung up on the word itself, rather than the qualities we’re looking to promote” (Lukasiewicz, 2020). While no obvious synthesis emerged from all these alternatives to journalistic objectivity, they illuminate the spectrum of potential interpretations and conceptualizations. What they also reveal is the challenge of articulating alternative values that are neither vague nor too general. Objectivity, despite or maybe because of its polysemic character, arguably allows for modalities that give the term specificity, as I will explore in the discussion section below.
As much as these suggestions focused on alternatives to journalistic objectivity as a moral ideal, some journalists and their news organizations also put forward ideas for improving reporting practices to include a social justice perspective. For example, the network of Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION) highlighted a range of tactics that thirteen of its members used to enhance the diversity of community voices in their coverage (Anand, 2020). With regard to reporting and editing practices, the network advocated for creating transparency about how newsrooms are organizing their reporting process and sharing demographics about their staff. Another set of recommendations emphasized the role of community outreach by creating a community editorial board or facilitating public conversations with the goal of building empathy.
Response from the mainstream press
As much as Lowery’s op-ed piece was applauded and embraced by a broad coalition of journalists of color and critical researchers, it also elicited pushback and resistance, particularly in the journalism establishment. In a series of 22 nuanced tweets on Twitter, Tom Rosenstiel (2020), the executive director of the American Press Institute, offered a defense of objectivity as “deeply reported open minded inquiry” and also rejected Lowery’s call for moral clarity. It’s worth citing four of these tweets in their entirety. “I loved Wes’ essay […]. But I fear a new misunderstanding is taking root in newsrooms today, one could [sic] destroy the already weakened system of journalism on which democracy depends.” (15) “That misunderstanding is the idea that if we adopt subjectivity to replace a misunderstood concept of objectivity, we will have magically arrived at truth—that anything I am passionate about and believe deeply is a kind of real truth.” (16) “If journalists replace a flawed understanding of objectivity by taking refuge in subjectivity and think their opinions have more moral integrity than genuine inquiry, journalism will be lost.” (18) “If we mistake subjectivity for truth, we will have wounded an already weakened profession at a critical time. If we lose the ability to understand other points of view we will have allowed our passions to overwhelm the purpose democratic society requires of the press. (21)
Rosenstiel was eager to point out that he thought Lowery’s article was “a fine essay” but could be “not clearly understood.” What is striking about this response, is that Rosenstiel conceptualizes the contrast between Lowery’s perspective and his own as binary dichotomy of objectivity versus subjectivity. However, as Stephen Ward (2020) pointed out in a different context, the opposite of objectivity is not subjectivity but “irrationalism, emotionalism, extreme religious fundamentalism, occultism, and fraudulent mysticism.” Moreover, Lowery’s argument actually did not question the mode of inquiry. In fact, as quoted above, he urges journalists to make sure “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.” This approach, in fact, appears to overlap considerably with Rosenstiel’s call for “genuine inquiry.” How to address both the resonance and the tension between Lowery’s and Rosenstiel’s standpoints will be further deconstructed in the discussion section.
When New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, the first African American journalist to hold this position, was asked about Lowery’s essay, he sympathized to some degree with rearticulating the concept if understood as enhancing fairness and independence. At the same time, Baquet—similar to Rosenstiel—emphasized how objectivity safeguards a specific mode of inquiry. “The independent and fair reporter,” he said, “gets on an airplane to pursue a story with an empty notebook believing that he or she doesn’t fully know what the story is and is going to be open to what they hear. That’s my definition. Open to what you hear. Empathetic to what you hear.” (Longform, 2020) As Jon Allsop, 2020b reflected on Baquet’s response in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, he also made comparisons to Marty Baron of the Washington Post, analyzing how the “two of the industry’s most central pillars” were dealing with current discussions about racial justice and newsroom diversity. Allsop, 2020b argued that “[b]oth [...]sit broadly within the tradition that Lowery and others are critiquing. Failures of diversity, and coverage of race, and coverage of Trump are all intertwined—and they all require a no-holds-barred assessment of whether top journalistic institutions’ core values are fit for purpose, not a reflexive defense of those values as inseparable from the institution.” Analyzing the response from the mainstream press to Lowery’s article, Masha Gessen (2020) stated, “American mainstream media are actively redrawing the boundaries of the sphere of legitimate controversy, and the location of that boundary is, itself, a subject of legitimate controversy.”
Discussion
How can we make sense of these disagreements between those criticizing the dominance of objectivity as a journalistic role orientation and of those wanting to safeguard objectivity as professional ideal? In the following discussion I argue that each of the three analytical dimensions of criticism (subjectivity, social inequities, power structures) speaks to a different modality of objectivity (procedural, ethical, ideological respectively). After explaining these three modalities I explore how disagreements between critics and traditionalists vary in substance and depth across these modalities. Ultimately this analysis shows how certain disagreements are minor and reconcilable while others are profound and existential.
When critics of objectivity emphasize subjective elements of news reporting they address the procedural modality of objectivity, highlighting how the term signifies a particular procedure for establishing facts from an intersubjective perspective. Objectivity here is associated with “inverted pyramid news story (news organized in a descending order of importance) and with the 5 Ws and H (who, what, where, why, when, and how) or other systems of sorting out the facts necessary to convey the essence of an event or issue in an orderly fashion” (Dennis and Merrill, 1984: 103). The key objective in this modality is to establish a shared sense of reality, making sure that depictions are supported by evidence and checked against challenges of their validity.
In contrast, when critics of objectivity advocate for the recognition of social inequities they appeal to the ethical modality of the term, in the sense that reporting is done from a particular social standpoint and field position. Traditionally, the ethical aspects of objectivity found expressions in terms like “fairness,” “balance,” and “impartiality.” However, to avoid the simplistic impression that objectivity merely mediates between two alternative views (the he-said-she-said trap), a better way to capture this ethical dimension is what Ward calls “situated” objectivity. “The key is not to abandon one’s human situation and beliefs but to be willing to subject them to public scrutiny.” (Ward, 2020: 32). In this modality, then, the purpose of objectivity is to acknowledge a specific vantage point, a social position and try to minimize unexamined assumptions.
The third modality that challengers of objectivity address concerns objectivity as a form of ideology. Here I am inspired by the view of Novick who understands ideology as “an overarching and at-least-tacitly coherent outlook on the world” consisting of three elements: “(1) a picture of the way the world is; (2) a picture of the way the world ought to be; (3) a set of propositions about the relationship between the first and the second” (Novick, 1988: 61-62). Furthermore, as Novick suggests, ideologies can be dominant, accommodationist or oppositional. An ideology is dominant when there is a near match between the “is” and the “ought.” An ideology is accommodationist if it acknowledges problems and deficiencies, yet treats them as singular issues that can be resolved. An oppositional ideology is characterized by the belief that the gap between the “is” and the “ought” reflects patterned and interrelated defects that would require fundamental structural change. Transposing this view of ideology to the context of journalism, then, objectivity can be viewed as a dominant, or at least, accommodationist ideology.
If we now analyze the challenges to journalistic objectivity as well as the responses from the established press against this backdrop, the following picture emerges: There is little disagreement about the procedural modality, substantial disagreement about the ethical modality, and fundamental disagreement about the ideological dimension of objectivity.
As for the procedural modality, there is relative consensus about the value of objectivity as the result of a process to determine intersubjective validity. Both the critics and the defenders of objectivity are still embracing the pursuit of verifiable information. Lowery, for example, advocates for “being fair and telling the truth” as well as “accuracy” in reporting (see above). The areas of news values and story selection (who gets to choose what stories and for what purpose) might introduce differences in judgment, but these points of potential friction do not take away from the fundamental agreement that depictions of reality need to be supported by evidence. In a way, when Lowery and others emphasize that all reporting is subjective, they mistake a procedural problem (which can be solved by introducing checks and balances) with an ethical one (for which there is no straightforward resolution because of the subjectivity of one’s standpoint).
With regard to the ethical modality of objectivity, challengers of objectivity call for situated practices that take into consideration the relative standpoint of journalists including their racial, ethnic, gender, and intersectional identities, while defenders of the status quo are implying that even though objectivity might not be perfect it is arguably the least bad form of journalistic professionalism. Yet, what defenders (e.g. Rosenstiel and Baquet in the examples above) often overlook is that they are prioritizing individual responsibility over collective soul-searching. Ultimately, they respond to an ethical challenge with a procedural solution, thus ignoring the social foundations of epistemological questions.
Finally, the ideological modality of objectivity marks the actual battleground where competing visions about objectivity clash. This modality is not ideological in the sense of left and right, but in terms of pitting calls for change against pleas for protecting a professional ideal. Critics of objectivity take an oppositional stance and decry celebrations of objectivity as nothing less than hegemonic expressions of an ossified orthodoxy protecting the status quo. As Novick characterized the radical oppositionist, they reject “the possibility of substantially closing the gap [between the “is” and the “ought”] without fundamental structural change” (Novick: 62). On the other hand, defenders of conventional objectivity want to retain objectivity as a goal that might be impossible to achieve but necessary to strive for. In that sense, their position is “accommodationist” (in Novick’s words). It is this struggle between oppositionist and accommodationist views that lies at the core of current debates around journalistic objectivity. What is at stake in this struggle is not only what objectivity ought to look like, but also how any transformations of normative ideals should be enacted.
Ultimately, this ideological struggle points towards profound disagreements that require further attention. Based on the analysis above, I would like to identify these fissures in two specific areas that signal a departure from conventional understandings of journalistic objectivity: (1) Journalists who are advocating for a stronger commitment to social justice are trying to expand the procedural understanding of objectivity as simply a mode of inquiry to also encompass ethical considerations that acknowledge how historic injustice, structural inequities, and racial hierarchies affect journalists’ standpoints. A focus on social standpoint does not necessarily trump procedural rigor and a commitment to open minded inquiry. That this strong commitment to uncovering social and racial injustice is not antithetical to a democratic understanding of journalism, is reflected in a recent conceptualization of a normative theory for journalism by Anderson (2021), who advocates for moving away from thinking about the “the primary purpose of journalism as the provision of basic factual information for the monitorial public.” Instead, he argues that what he labels as “a journalism of fear” would “seek to expose cruelty, take the side of the weak versus the strong, and contribute to a distinctly liberal form of political solidarity, one that saw the deliberate infliction of pain as the worst thing any powerful authority could do (Anderson, 2021: 1925).”
(2) The second fissure in the current discourse about journalistic objectivity concerns journalists’ interpretations of what accountability journalism looks like. The term was coined by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr. (see Anderson et al., 2016) and embraced by Michael Schudson (2020) to demarcate a journalism that matters most for democratic societies: investigative journalism combined with fact-checking and “aggressive everyday coverage of various news beats from national security to government, politics, business, the environment, education, and the news media industry itself” (Schudson, 2020). Historically and traditionally, accountability journalism referred to a core commitment of many journalists: to hold government accountable. However, the analysis of challenges to the journalistic objectivity shows that journalists advocate for a broader notion of what “accountability” means in that they not only want to hold people in power accountable but also power structures. Holding powerful institutions accountable, then, would broaden the mission of accountability journalism in the sense of “making systemic injustice visible.” This perspective resonates with Callison and Young’s (2020) call to journalists for questioning conventional standards of fairness and balance and instead consider subjectivity, structural concerns and histories. And this shift aligns with what Ward (2020: 187) conceptualized as “objectively engaged journalism,” which he describes as “a wide reformist journalism whose overall goal is the improvement of democratic civic life” and a journalism that accepts a situated objectivity. This perspective is also put forward by Robinson and Culver (2019: 376) who see this kind of pragmatic objectivity not as a “move toward ‘opinionated’ journalism but instead focused on evidence, coherence, with expertise and knowledge, and inclusion of diverse perspectives.”
To sum up, these challenges to journalistic objectivity clearly indicate that the normative foundations of objectivity as chief occupational norm in American journalism are contested. According to Schudson (2001), one of the key characteristics of an occupational norm is that journalists articulate a moral ideal and express allegiance to it in formal and informal ways. In that sense, current challenges to journalistic objectivity demonstrate how actors in the journalistic field are actively engaged in rearticulating and renegotiating core tenets of objectivity as chief occupational norm. In a way, then, the contested nature of objectivity also signifies an ideological struggle, hinting at a potential institutional crisis with regard to journalism’s capacity for facilitating public discourse. The response of journalism to moments of crisis since the beginning of the twentieth century, as Anderson (2018: 4) observed, “has been to double down on its commitment to objectivity, often shifting definitions of what objectivity means but holding fast to its ideal and even, in many cases, struggling to become more objective rather than less (Schudson 1978).” Based on this experience, the tensions between journalistic objectivity and social justice will likely linger.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.