Over decades of teaching, appearing on panels and supervising reporting projects, one of the most frequent questions I have faced is how journalists remain objective while reporting our stories.
The answer is complicated. You might say that we don’t, and while you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, that is hardly the end of the story.
In the course of producing stories, we learn so much about the various people and institutions we cover that it isn’t humanly possible to avoid forming opinions about them.
So how do we keep our coverage fair despite this? One way to think about it is what you are asked to do when serving on a jury. If you have any bias toward the person on trial, you’re asked to put that aside and only take the facts as they are proved into account when making your judgment.
Most journalists would make great jurors because they act like them on every story that comes across their desks.
In fully staffed newsrooms, we’ve traditionally also had systems in place to counteract any prejudicial statements that make their way into the early drafts of articles. Our colleagues, editors and fact checkers — and in big stores, our lawyers — act collectively as devil’s advocates to test and retest our assumptions and conclusions.
Unfortunately, much of what I’m describing is from the newsrooms of the past, which may no longer exist in many of today’s media organizations after waves of layoffs, buyouts and corporate takeovers.
But with or without those layers of support, the burden remains on every journalist to produce fair and balanced stories and above all else to get it right.
Because in the end, the truth is our best defense.
***
Traditionally, in newspapers, there was a strict line between the reporting we did in news coverage and the opinions expressed 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.
Though the distinction between “analysis” and “opinion” was largely fictional, it was a useful fiction that newspapers employed successfully for many years.
Meanwhile, 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. Anyone who ever visited the nearest bar to a big-city newspaper office knows exactly what I’m talking about.
(Recent examples include the endorsement controversies at the Washington Post and L.A. Times prior to last November’s election.)
When baby boomers — the largest generation ever to hit American workplaces — came onto the scene, we brought a new level of tension to the line between news and opinion — and the myth of objectivity.
For one thing, we were better educated than the older generation and many of us had been deeply affected by the civil rights and anti-war movements. We weren’t neutral at all on the biggest questions like racism or imperialism — we knew where we stood.
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 department than a force for truth.
At the same time, we found established reporters and editors who resisted all those entrenched prejudices and practices and challenged them at key moments. These were our heroes.
We also discovered that there were a few 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 in 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 knew we needed to stay open to following the facts to wherever they led, and that it was vital to act as our own devil’s advocate to counter the biases and prejudices we inevitably brought to the story.
In the end, to be a journalist you have to be able to present the truth as you discover it to be, not as you might wish it to be.
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 on occasion to speak out when asked about the meaning of what we had found.
That’s how some of us came to be called “alternative journalists” or “new journalists” or “gonzo journalists.” Take your pick. Once our reporting was complete, we spoke 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.
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