Against “Objective” Journalism
(posted by Kevin Carson)
The conventional model of “objectivity” in professional journalism (otherwise known as “he said, she said” and “stenography”), as it’s practiced today in the dead tree media, goes back to Walter Lippmann.
As Christopher Lasch described it, in The Revolt of the Elites, Lippmann’s view of society and government in general was that
[s]ubstantive questions could be safely left to experts, whose access to scientific knowledge immunized them against the emotional “symbols” and “stereotypes” that dominated public debate.
His influence on twentieth century journalism, in particular, was to destroy the earlier function of newspapers in the nineteenth century as the center of democratic debate.
Newspapers might have served as extensions of the town meeting. Instead they embraced a misguided ideal of objectivity and defined their goal as the circulation of reliable information….
Lasch believed that ideal of objectivity was wrong-headed because it ignored the dialectical nature of truth:
What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be generated only by debate. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively–if we take it in at all.
* * *
Lippmann had forgotten what he learned (or should have learned) from William James and John Dewey: that our search for reliable information is itself guided by the questions that arise during arguments about a given course of action. It is only by subjecting our preferences and projects to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn…. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of “opinions”…. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.
The partisan press of the nineteenth century is the classic example of the emergence of truth through dialectic, or the adversarial process. “Their papers [Greeley's, Godkin's, etc., nineteenth century party newspapers] were journals of opinion in which the reader expected to find a definite point of view, together with unrelenting criticism of opposing points of view.” Lippmann’s view of the world, on the other hand, amounted to a “spectator theory of knowledge.”
There are serious problems with the “both sides” model of “objective reporting.” As Justin Lewis described it in Project Censored Yearbook 2000,
The norms of “objective reporting” thus involve presenting “both sides” of an issue with very little in the way of independent forms of verification… [A] journalist who systematically attempts to verify facts–to say which set of facts is more accurate–runs the risk of being accused of abandoning their objectivity by favoring one side over another….
….[J]ournalists who try to be faithful to an objective model of reporting are simultaneously distancing themselves from the notion of independently verifiable truth….
The “two sides” model of journalistic objectivity makes news reporting a great deal easier since it requires no recourse to a factual realm. There are no facts to check, no archives of unspoken information to sort through…. If Tweedledum fails to challenge a point made by Tweedledee, the point remains unchallenged.
Regarding this last point, the New York Times‘ Steven R. Weisman explicitly defended as right and proper the fact that mainstream journalists wouldn’t independently raise a fact that wasn’t raised by the opposition party. From Brent Cunningham again:
The Republicans were saying only what was convenient, thus the “he said.” The Democratic leadership was saying little, so there was no “she said.” “Journalists are never going to fill the vacuum left by a weak political opposition,” says The New York Times’s Steven R. Weisman.
So also said former Washington Post assistant managing editor Karen DeYoung (as reported by slactivist):
“We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power. … If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said.”
Got that? So if an elected official stands up and says the moon is made out of green cheese, a newspaper is not obliged to challenge this assertion.
That means that when the “opposition” is as gutless and contemptible as the Democrats have been over Iraq these past six years or so, the public is essentially screwed when it comes to information that might challenge the administration’s version of reality.
My favorite exposition of this model of “journalism” was made by The Daily Show’s Rob Corddry:
STEWART: Here’s what puzzles me most, Rob. John Kerry’s record in Vietnam is pretty much right there in the official records of the US military, and haven’t [sic] been disputed for 35 years?
CORDDRY: That’s right, Jon, and that’s certainly the spin you’ll be hearing coming from the Kerry campaign over the next few days.
STEWART: Th-that’s not a spin thing, that’s a fact. That’s established.
CORDDRY: Exactly, Jon, and that established, incontravertible fact is one side of the story.
STEWART: But that should be — isn’t that the end of the story? I mean, you’ve seen the records, haven’t you? What’s your opinion?
CORDDRY: I’m sorry, my opinion? No, I don’t have “o-pin-i-ons”. I’m a reporter, Jon, and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called ‘objectivity’ — might wanna look it up some day.
STEWART: Doesn’t objectivity mean objectively weighing the evidence, and calling out what’s credible and what isn’t?
CORDDRY: Whoa-ho! Well, well, well — sounds like someone wants the media to act as a filter! [high-pitched, effeminate] “Ooh, this allegation is spurious! Upon investigation this claim lacks any basis in reality! Mmm, mmm, mmm.” Listen buddy: not my job to stand between the people talking to me and the people listening to me.
Mainstream journalism, in a futile attempt to seem “less opinionated,” avoids reporting a great deal of information that is newsworthy in the sense of shedding light on the official version of things.
I say the attempt is “futile” because in practice it amounts to mainstream journalism uncritically promoting an unexamined opinion of its own.
Mainstream journalism is unconsciously biased toward the official version of reality. The “both sides” model, Brent Cunningham wrote,
exacerbates our tendency to rely on official sources, which is the easiest, quickest way to get both the “he said” and the “she said,” and, thus, “balance.” According to numbers from the media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 stories on Iraq broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from last September to February, all but thirty-four originated at the White House, Pentagon, and State Department. So we end up with too much of the “official” truth.
More important, objectivity makes us wary of seeming to argue with the president — or the governor, or the CEO — and risk losing our access….
Finally, objectivity makes reporters hesitant to inject issues into the news that aren’t already out there. “News is driven by the zeitgeist,” says Jonathan Weisman, “and if an issue isn’t part of the current zeitgeist then it will be a tough sell to editors.” But who drives the zeitgeist, in Washington at least? The administration.
Some 40% of newspaper column inches, the last I read, are taken up by material generated by public spokesmen, press releases, and PR departments.
Another version of the same phenomenon is wire service reporters writing stories on foreign events from their hotel rooms, using handouts from the U.S. Embassy. A good example is AP coverage of the anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela in the spring of 2002. After the removal of Chavez, the White House stuck to the talking point that he “resigned,” and their doggies at the Associated Press stuck to it faithfully. Indymedia and Narco News Bulletin, meanwhile, reported that Chavez had not resigned, and was being held incommunicado.
When the people of Venezuela, for once, managed to thwart the will of the Killer Klowns and blood money men in Washington and restore Chavez, guess what? It turned out the White House and its AP stooges had been lying, and Indymedia and NarcoNews were telling the truth.
Cunningham’s remarks above on loss of access are far from hypothetical. Consider, for example, the Pentagon’s reaction to Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks:
In his more than two decades covering the military, Ricks has developed many sources, from brass to grunts. This, according to the current Pentagon, is a problem.
The Pentagon’s letter of complaint to Post executive editor Leonard Downie had language charging that Ricks casts his net as widely as possible and e-mails many people.
Details of the complaints were hard to come by. One Pentagon official said in private that Ricks did not give enough credence to official, on-the-record comments that ran counter to the angle of his stories.
But the outrage isn’t limited to official circles. It extends to establishment journalism itself. The New Republic, the Holy See of the kind of Crolyite managerialism I despise, went so far as to contrast “objectivity” with “truth” (to the prejudice of the latter, of course). It accused bloggers of
chasing Truth without the shackles of objectivity…. The MSM makes an earnest (albeit occasionally flawed) effort to achieve a neutral understanding of events, and that’s the source of an authority and prestige that even its harshest critics… must respect….
Some apologists for the old gatekeeper media like to accuse bloggers of pyramiding on the investigative work of traditional journalists. They argue that bloggers are mostly just reproducing material from the old-line news media, or using material generated by professional reporters.
And there’s probably something to it: Internet journalism has far fewer direct shoe-leather reporters doing the grunt work of journalism, painstakingly builting lists of contacts, etc., and probably always will. It’s quite true that blogs, to a considerable extent, reproduce or rewrite traditional news; I’ve seen many examples of it.
Nevertheless I don’t think it’s a fair critcism, because it fails to grasp the importance of what blogs do with information obtained elsewhere. Blogs don’t just reproduce it or rewrite it.
The Web seems to be, increasingly, separating the functional task of reporting from the old aggregating roles of newspapers and their editorial staff. The reporting done by the people on the ground can now be aggregated in a thousand different venues.
Bloggers and online journals, in most cases, probably aren’t nearly as good as traditional newspapers when it comes to matching the human capital directly engaged in reporting. But they’re much better than newspapers at selecting from all the reporting available out there, putting the raw material together, and talking about what it means. If traditional journalists are better at collecting the information, in other words, bloggers are better at doing something with it.
Networked, peer produced journalism can use the product of established reporters, with their contacts, as a building block; they can put the raw material generated by “professional” journalists to better use.
A blogger will often link to the official statement of a public
spokesman, and quote extensively from it. That much a traditional journalist would also do. But the blogger will then put the statement in context by linking to a wide range of reported news from numerous traditional media sources, including current news that directly contradicts the official version of reality, or to past official statements that directly contradict what the government is saying now. A blogger isn’t afraid to flat-out state the fact, for example, that the President is lying.
In other words, bloggers are the new newspapers. For the most part they don’t do the leg work of reporting themselves, or generate the raw material. But they aggregate and interpret it in ways that traditional newspapers should be doing–but aren’t. The human infrastructure of traditional reporting is a magnificent army. But as Lincoln said to McClellan, “if you’re not planning to do anything with that army, may I borrow it?”
Far better than the twentieth century model of fake neutrality, with its pose of credulity toward official claims, is the nineteenth century party press. That model of journalism was based, as Lasch said above of Godkin and Greeley, on the understanding that truth emerges from dialectic—from the adversarial process. The way to arrive at truth is to apply logic to the facts and make the best case for reality, as you see it, that you can. Any bias in your case will be ruthlessly cross-examined by others using logic and evidence to make their own case.
When a blogger presents a one-sided version of reality, guess what happens? They’re hyperlinked by an opposing blogger, who then puts their one-sided account into perspective by linking to the information they left out.
It’s only through such an adversarial process, with all the entry barriers removed from the marketplace of ideas, that the whole truth can emerge. This way is certainly better than a deliberate pose of obtuseness, pretending not to see what’s staring you right in the face, for fear the facts might show that reality itself is biased.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:09 am
Mencius Moldbug has been all over that. He’s ass-backwards on a lot though.
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:13 am
False Balance tends to be something the MSM are often guilty of as well.
This article is a good example (and not meaning this as a statement about speed limits one way or the other as it is something people tend to suffer from religion about, just as an example of bad journalism [and worse, bad maths!]).
It quotes the official figures, and then for ‘balance’ those of an advocacy organisation, who, like most advocacy orgs arrive at their figures by a process of starting off with a belief, and then hunting for something to support them: even if it requires a little bit of crank science creativity. In this case their numbers seem to suggest that driving slower actually leads to more fatalities, a conclusion counter-intuitive enough that you would expect a major newspaper like the Torygraph to get someone with at least basic maths skills to check into them.
The flaw in this case lies in the fact that the percentages used are a percentage of the total, a total which is lower for the lower speed bracket.
E.g. using Using a base of 100 accidents per year just for the sake of having a figure (and the 57% reduction figure quoted — which could well be nonsense as well, governments being what they are) and because it leads to the the real %ages.
Sans 20 zones : 100 accidents @ 13% fatality = 13 dead
With 20 zones : 43 accidents @ 17% fatality = 9.69 dead
So the real figures aren’t 17% and 13%, but 9.69% and 13%
Speculatively speaking, the fact the %age of the total increases is probably down to there being a certain number of accidents that are going to result in death at even very low speeds (such as those involving young children or the elderly).
The way the article is written, however, including allowing the advocacy guy the last say, actually gives it more weight than the one it is meant to be ‘balancing’.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:19 am
I think I am going to have to pick up that Lasch book. Basically, I agree with the points you made. In the 19th century, most people got their information from sources that were openly partisan and/or ethnically/organizationally specific. For news about labor, read the Labor Tribune, to find out what the local church group is up to, pick up Presbyterianism today, if you’re a Democratic, read the Daily Democrat–and no one is stopping you from reading all three. It definitely facilitated a vibrant political culture that made it possible to challenge slavery, organize labor unions, etc. in the face of overwhelming political odds.
As to whether the blogoshpere is the second coming–I am not so sure. It may have that potential–but we are still a ways away. In my opinion, bloggers have a tendency to overestimate their own significance. This is primarily fed by other bloggers and ironically, sectors of the mainstream punditocracy.
It isn’t all that clear to me that blogging is that democratic in the substantive sense, since bloggers comprise a marginal percentage of the population and their readership is limited, not just by organization/ethnicity/affinity but, by social status and access. Even in a country like the US, only about half the households have regular access to the internet. Expand the sample-size to the world, and you have a minute fraction of the world population talking to itself a lot about how important it is–which arguably reinforces social hierarchy, the filtering of information, etc. (not to throw a damper on the many bloggers, including myself, who post here–just keepin’ it real).
There is no doubt that it is more possible to access varied opinion and information from the net–the challenge is to expand both the inputs and outputs on the net and to not mistake vigorous debates in the “Matrix” with political activity in the real world—it is easy to forget their is no spoon on the internet because often the steak tastes really good. I guess I still think we have a ways to go to get back to that democratic culture of the 19th century.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:50 am
Thanks for the link, TGGP.
Bunty,
The false balance thing ties in with another aspect of the issue I meant to discuss if the post wasn’t getting so long: the definition of “moderation” and “centrism” in terms of a conventional widsom which, itself, is defined by the culture of dominant institutions. To the extent that “moderation” means tinkering around the edges of the present system rather than altering the fundamental structure of power, it implies adopting only those “solutions” that can be implemented by those currently running the structure of power, and that are consistent with their overall interests.
Goffchile,
The potential is there, anyway. Democratic journalism doesn’t require a majority of the public to be directly engaged in the activity, just the absence of artificial entry barriers. There’s no longer anything standing in the way of anyone talking back to the gatekeepers, because the entry cost for setting up a blog that can reach millions of people is virtually zero. At any rate, I think the number of bloggers probably exceeds the number of traditional journalists, and the readership of traditional papers is at an all-time low. On the issue of whether the democratic nature of network culture is overblown, and whether it follows a power law distribution, I highly recommend Yochai Benkler’s book.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Awesome post.
I don’t know how you’d feel about this characterization Kevin, but your overall point is very Hayekian. The concept of truth as emergent and and constantly subject to revision by the “competition” (the right wing term?) of discrete individuals’ news gathering abilities and ideological face offs.
There’s a small contradiction I think between the idea of news being left to “experts” and “objectivity” and the current status quo, where what’s left of the news monopolists tend to juxtapose differing official points of view as “objective”. A critic in the vein of Lippman might suggest that journalists actually learn statistics, or listen to political scientists, economists, etc., rather than PR firms for this or that interest group.
Here is a study on the extent to which blogs actually DO engage in a kind of democratic, neo-town hall collective discussion:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p7m41t21344130t7/?p=64b1741debcf4131987f124da8ddfe46&pi=4
It finds that Sunstein’s pessimism of online ideological fortresses that protect people from differing opinions is unwarranted, yet it empirically shows that indeed “liberal” and “conservative” bloggers rarely link to one another, as Sunstein predicted. I guess the question is: How much should we EXPECT them to constantly talk to one another? In the nineteenth century, as now, the bulk of one’s time will be others of like interests, but nonetheless cross-talk takes place. This study shows that the (small, but real) level of cross talk has remained constant in the decade or so that they’ve looked at this.
I guess I’d note that unlike Sunstein, who believes that during the reign of old media everyone HAD to converge on the same forum thus facilitating real discussion, that scenario was always in fact hiding other points of view, and so any sense of harmony was a fraud.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Somewhat OT, but related in that the point of this blog is to present at least two viewpoints on the world (liberal and libertarian) -
What happened to the ‘liberal’ authors here? I have to go back 17 articles to find one not written by Mona or Kevin!
I am very much interested in the nexus of modern liberalism and libertarianism, and love Kevin and Mona’s work. It’s just that it’s starting to look like we libertarians have taken over.
I know all too well how time consuming blogging meaningful stories can be, so I’m not casting aspersions. I’m just making it clear that I also appreciated the earlier articles written by Angelica and Paige, and want to see more, in order to realize the full potential of this project!
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Thanks for the link, Dain. It touches on some of the same issues Benkler discussed.
Quasibill,
I share your view of things. I look forward to more posting by Angelica, Paige and Jackson. The last time Angelica posted she said she was in a rush and snowed under with work at her day job as reporter at the Taipei Times. So hopefully the posts will resume when the rush is past. Then, too, I’m not sure who’s on board at any given time. Lawrence Krubner, the blog owner, mentioned that I might be on a five-weeks-on and five-off schedule to increase the number of voices here, so something like that may also be going on.
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
My point is that in order for the bloggers to have to the effect of the 19th century newspaper, it requires civic engagement beyond debating in a relatively closed circle (regardless of the apparent ideological diversity of the circle). To put it in terms from other threads–how much progress have we made if the “New Class” simply has more tools to debate amongst itself how to manage the world? I would argue that there *are* significant entry barriers–owning a computer, internet access, and time being huge. Amongst folks who have all these things, that may sound silly–but a lot of folks don’t–and because of the medium–how will bloggers “get out their message” to this group unless they are engaged directly with them? I don’t need to own a printing press to read a newspaper, but I do need a computer to read a blog.
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:02 pm
I agree that those are significant barriers, but even taking them into account over half the households in the country have computers, and the percentage is likely to increase. And in the end, I think the democracy of the medium has more to do with the shifting percentage of the population that gets its news from blogs and Internet journalism compared to dead tree papers. As far as voice goes, what really matters is the ease of talking back if you want to. And while a desktop is a significant capital expenditure for many people, the cost (a few hundred bucks for a no-frills one, even less if you look around for a used one) is several orders of magnitude less than the capital investments that were required to get into conventional newsprint publishing. And the drastically reduced cost of desktop publishing is a factor in democratizing print as well.
April 4th, 2008 at 12:41 am
goffchile:
I think the latter is by far the most important. In more or less every city, the availability of Internet terminals in public schools and public libraries means that not owning your own PC, or not being able to afford home Internet access, is no longer a significant barrier to web-based applications like blogging. Working 60 hours a week at three different jobs, on the other hand, is.
Besides the barriers on the supply-side, the other important concern (which a lot of feminist bloggers, for example, have raised) is on the demand-side. As many millions of blogs as there may be, attention in blogging is structured much more hierarchically than blog boosters are inclined to acknowledge, and that hierarchical structure much more closely reflects traditional social hierarchy than they care to admit (actually, often, a hyperthyroidic version of traditional social hierarchy, because straight white male educated professional “A-list” bloggers have, so far, been subjected to critical scrutiny far less than straight white male educated professional “MSM” outfits).
Unfortunately being able to speak is fairly irrelevant, from the standpoint of politics or civil society, if nobody hears what you have to say, or nobody takes it seriously enough to consider it worth listening to. I think that blogs are a move in the right direction — and one which will become increasingly important with time — but there’s a long walk down and a long, hard slog ahead between that mountaintop to the Promised Land.
April 4th, 2008 at 12:53 am
I should say that in the medium to long term, actually, I think that what will be far more important than any blogger’s ability to show up on the mainstream media’s radar, or even to break through into “A-list” bloggers’ boys’ club mutual linking society, is that blogs are making it much easier for writers with a distinctive view to simply bypass broadcasting prominence and to reach a smaller, mostly self-selected audience with more narrowly focused interests. As people change their habits of reading, conversing, and news-gathering, broadcast success will become less and less relevant, and deadlocked mainstream consensuses will be shifted because, by nearly imperceptible steps, the ground collapses out from under them, not because some mighty force erupts up through them. But, again, we’re still a long way from that, and I think that part of the process of getting to that will involve recognizing how far we are from it and consciously changing our tools and our habits (in both reading and writing) to work towards traversing the gap.
April 4th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Probably the simplest example of stenography is the way that they uncritically report the repeated deaths of the #3 guy in Al Qaeda. At no point does a news report raise any question about the significance of the latest Arab hit by a cruise missile. He’s always #3 in Al Qaeda. Always.
Another example is the reporting on violence in Iraq: If violence goes down, we need to stay (and the surge is working!). If violence goes up, we need to stay (and the surge is working!).
I suspect that stenography is one of the ingredients required for 1984.
April 4th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Rad Geek said: “blogs are making it much easier for writers with a distinctive view to simply bypass broadcasting prominence and to reach a smaller, mostly self-selected audience with more narrowly focused interests.”
Which in time, will lead to cross talk in other venues between fans of one set of blogs and another… the linkages will grow organically. In some sense, the comment threads may be the most important part of blogs.
As for the “both sides” paradigm of journalism, that also creates a big problem with The Excluded Other. There are points of view and facts inconsistent with either “official side” of the story, that just never appear in Official Journalism because “that’s crazy talk!”. One problem then is that that leaves that information in the hands of people who often are a bit wacky. What blogs can do, as Kevin pointed out, is to grab those pieces from the Alex Joneses of the internet, for instance, that make sense and re-integrate them into a new paradigm.
April 4th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Unfortunately being able to speak is fairly irrelevant, from the standpoint of politics or civil society, if nobody hears what you have to say, or nobody takes it seriously enough to consider it worth listening to.
There is no reason to bother listening to most people.