Over many decades of teaching classes, appearing on panels, speaking at ethics seminars, and doing or supervising hundreds of reporting projects, one of the most frequent questions I faced was how journalists were supposed to possibly stay objective when doing this work.
The short answer to that is that we can’t. And we don’t.
In the course of producing stories, we learn so much about the various people and institutions we cover, it is simply not possible to avoid drawing conclusions and forming opinions about them.
So of course we do. And the more informed we become, the stronger our opinions tend to become. It’s only human.
The question is what do we then do with our opinions? Can we keep covering the same stories, pretending to be objective?
Traditionally, in newspapers, there was a strict line between the reporting we did in news coverage and the opinions expressed on the editorial page. Beat reporters rarely ventured over to the opinion side, which was considered unseemly. But there was more than a bit of irony in that as we were often the best-informed people employed by the paper on the subjects on the editorial page.
One attempt to bridge this gap was to have the beat writers produce analysis pieces, which bridged the gap between reporting and opinion and were traditional journalism’s answer to the objectivity problem.
The distinction between “analysis” and “opinion” was largely fictional but it was a useful fiction that newspapers employed successfully for many years.
Another aspect of the objectivity problem was that the ownership of the newspaper often held different opinions and loyalties on the major topics of coverage from the reporters and editors who provided that coverage on a day-in, day-out basis.
This led to a great deal of tension on occasion between the news staff and those in charge of the editorial pages. Trust me, anyone who ever visited the nearest bar to a big-city newspaper office knows exactly what I am talking about.
When baby boomers — the largest generation ever to hit American workplaces including media — came along, we brought a new level of tension to this traditional dichotomy between news and opinion — and the myth of objectivity.
For one thing, we were better educated than the older generation and way too many of us had been shaped by the civil rights and anti-war movements to remain neutral on the great issues of the day. We weren’t neutral at all on questions like racism or colonial wars — we knew right from wrong.
Furthermore, we didn’t like what we found of the culture inside most newsrooms, which was all too often misogynistic, racist, homophobic and more like an arm of the local police union than a force for truth.
At the same time, we met heroes — established reporters and editors who resisted all those entrenched prejudices and practices that simply acted to reinforce powerful interests. These guys challenged those very interests on more than one occasion.
We also discovered that there were plenty of enlightened owners and executives in media who would support the type of crusading journalism we aspired to, so we worked for them whenever possible and joined the great muckraking traditions that long have served as a counterweight to mainstream, by-the-books news mongering in America.
When it came to remaining objective, we agreed that it was absolutely necessary to stay open-minded when we were gathering the facts about any situation. We needed to be open to adjusting our analysis as those facts came to light, and it was vital that we remained our own worst devil’s advocate to counter the biases and prejudices we inevitably brought to the story.
But you can’t discover the truth as you wish it to be, you have to accept the truth as you discover it to be. Equally importantly, you can’t bend the facts to fulfill the wishes or desires of your bosses or your audience — the chips must fall where they may.
But once all of that was said, once you’d been as fair as you could possibly be during the process of gathering facts, it became completely appropriate and indeed obligatory for any journalist of conscience to speak out when asked about the meaning of what we had found.
That’s how many of us became what some considered advocates or activists as well as journalists during our careers. We were often called “alternative journalists” or “new journalists” or “gonzo journalists.” Take your pick. And of course the traditionalists denounced us, for good reason. But once our reporting was complete, we made a point of speaking out.
That practice remains controversial to this day. But as my esteemed former Stanford colleague, Prof. Ted Glasser, once observed (and I paraphrase), “In the end, being a good citizen has to trump being a good journalist.”
Amen.
Note: I’ve published this essay previously a number of times, most recently in January.
LINKS:
US debt ceiling talks turn to work requirements for benefits programs (Reuters)
North Carolina’s GOP-led General Assembly overrides Democratic governor’s 12-week abortion ban veto (CNN)
Russia launches air raid attack against Kyiv (CBS)
Ukraine says it shot down advanced weapons fired from Russia (Today)
Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning (NYT)
ChatGPT's clever way of balancing 9 eggs with other objects convinced some Microsoft researchers that AI is becoming more like humans (Business Insider)
Mr. ChatGPT goes to Washington: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies before Congress on AI risks. (CNN)
US Senator Uses ChatGPT for Opening Remarks at a Hearing on AI (Bloomberg)
Digital data guardrails are the first step in regulating AI (The Hill)
Can We Stop Runaway A.I.? (New Yorker)
Google Bard gets another update that makes it better for research (TechRadar)
Open-Source AI Is Gaining on Google and ChatGPT (The Information)
ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. (Jesuit Review)
Couple uses artificial intelligence to redesign backyard: ‘AI is truly gonna take over so many jobs’ (Yahoo)
The Return to the Office Has Stalled (WSJ)
A lot of offices are still empty — and it's becoming a major risk for the economy (NPR)
A lonely nation: Has the notion of the 'American way' promoted isolation across history? (AP)
Move over, U.S. dollar. China wants to make the yuan the global currency. (WP)
Oceans have been absorbing the world’s extra heat. But there’s a huge payback (Guardian)
Bill Gates is full of regret about missed vacations and broken relationships in commencement speech: ‘You are not a slacker if you cut yourself some slack’ (Fortune)
George Santos Pleads Nonexistent (New Yorker)
No comments:
Post a Comment