But I was under the impression that “objectivity in the MSM” was already an oxymoron
We previously discussed the movement in journalism schools to get rid of principles of objectivity in journalism. Advocacy journalism is the new touchstone in the media even as polls show that trust in the media is plummeting. Now, former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward have released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”
Notably, while Bob Woodword and others have finally admitted that the Russian collusion coverage lacked objectivity and resulted in false reporting, media figures are pushing even harder against objectivity as a core value in journalism.
It is to laugh, as they say. A “core value”? Perhaps a core pretense, but not an actual value. That’s been true at least since Watergate, when advocacy journalism and speaking truth to power and reporters as iconoclastic (mostly anti-right) heroes took hold, and shaped later generation “journalists.” The change in nomenclature from reporter to journalist is not coincidental, either, and there was a concomitant change from the up-from-the-ranks hard-as-nails reporter to the English major graduate school journalist.
More from the Turley article:
Now the leaders of media companies are joining this self-destructive movement. They are not speaking of columnists or cable hosts who routinely share opinions. They are speaking of actual journalists, the people who are relied upon to report the news.
Saying that “Objectivity has got to go” is, of course, liberating. You can dispense with the necessities of neutrality and balance. You can cater to your “base” like columnists and opinion writers. Sharing the opposing view is now dismissed as “bothsidesism.” Done…
Downie echoes such views and declares “What we found has convinced us that truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever ‘objectivity’ once meant to produce more trustworthy news.”
Really? Being less objective will make the news more trustworthy?
It’s all part of what’s been going on in academia for decades, as a result of a combination of post-modernism and hubris. After all, objectivity is, among other things, supposed to help counter the tendency of those in power (and the press does have power) towards the hubris of thinking their own beliefs and goals are the same as the truth. That’s all gone, with a few nearly-extinct individuals such as Glenn Greenwald hanging around as living fossils.
Something Peter Drucker wrote in 1969:
“…it is quite possible that the great new “isms” of tomorrow will be ideologies about knowledge. In tomorrow’s intellectual and potential philosophies knowledge may well take the central place that property, i.e. things, occupied in Capitalism and Marxism.”
Seems pretty prescient…
The search for objective truth is hard work. Abandoning objectivity in reporting makes the job significantly easier; no messy digging for facts, interviewing multiple people, researching. Then just pass it off as virtuous.
A rational person should now be far warier of an academic opinion voiced on MSNBC (such as the drivel regularly spewed by Ruth Ben-Ghiat of NYU or Yale’s T Snyder) than that of an intelligent and well-informed (yet anonymous) blogger, as well as more inclined to lend credence to a tweet on social media from someone with a proven record of accurate assessments than to an “editorial” from Pravda-on-the-Hudson or Pravda-on-the-Potomac. Such are the depths to which have sunk both “academic expertise” and “journalistic expertise” (received “wisdom” amongst the chatterati and the wokerati) in our sadly-disintegrating republic.
Biased objectivity or objectively biased. Manipulators got to manipulate. Kinda like honest lying.
Journalists? “Presstitutes” is a more accurate term.
Remember when being the watchdog on government was the justification for having a free press? How can you be a watchdog when you’re partisan? That’s an attack dog, not a watch dog.
Holman Jenkins of the WSJ has really taken the gloves off recently in going after his fellow journalists, not that they even deserve to be called that. My favorite example from his column today:
In a galumphing bit of obtuseness perhaps explained by the byline of Charlie Savage, the paper then paints Mr. Durham as a Russian patsy for pawing through the innocent Mr. Benardo’s inbox in search of a fake email.
You just don’t see that level maliciousness very often, but very well deserved. And what a great line – galumphing bit of obtuseness – perfect!
probably so,
https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/01/the-corrupted-news-media-are-irredeemable-its-far-too-late-for-a-reckoning-of-the-trump-years/
i remember when I was a wee lad, I wrote a paper on richard nixon, this was 1978 and the library books had not painted him as pure evil then, that would come later,
I for one welcome the media dropping its pretense of objectivity. Fortunately, they’re too blinded by their ideological fanaticism to see that they’ve just destroyed all basis for their claim to truth. As if everyone has their own ‘truth’, then no one has a basis for asserting their view of truth to have any more validity than anyone else’s. Societal chaos among the gullible is the predictable result. Which of course is the left’s goal. Wherein they err is that its only their supporters who have no lodestone to cling to in turbulent times.
Thanks for the link miguel. I read The Federalist often but somehow missed that gem.
Since most of the US reporters went pro-Democrats-or-nothing-else, since around 1990/The fall of the Soviet Union, it’s nice that [some of the US reporters] have seen that they have: been acting unfairly biased…against all non-Democrats], for the past, 30 years.
I hope that these reporters will now drop these biases.
Okay. So some reporter gets a major fact wrong. Does it require a correction? After all, it’s “his truth”. So it can’t be reproached.
Sad situation for those who learned news was “who , what, when, where, why, and how.
It’s not possible to be “truth-seeking” if you summarily reject one side of an argument.
Completely partisan newspapers of the 19th century were part of early journalism. Late in the century sensationalism was called yellow journalism.
In an effort to “professionalize” journalism, university degree became available by the late 19th century.
The muckrackers of the early 20th century were the early adopters of advocacy journalism.
Then came gonzo journalism, made popular by Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In narrative form, it blended fact and fiction, immersing the author in the story.
It was a somewhat controversial topic in journalism school as advocacy journalism when I was in college. Since it was impossible to be completely unbiased, be fair, but present a point of view. My school was rather old fashioned and we practiced a balanced approach– though come to think of it, one of my professors was Lincoln Steffen’s son.
It’s been around for a long time, in one form or another, though for a time, reporters were schooled in how to put aside their biases and fairly represent opposing points of view. How well it was done varied.
We’ve now come full circle. In the early days at least, most towns had competing newspapers that were known for their particular point of view. We’ve lost most of that. The only saving grace is major media will be reduced to podcasts and substacks in the future.
I believe it was in the 1990s when the Journo Union removed “objectivity” from their “core values”. I found out about this in the early 2000s when a part-time journo I had an acquaintance with defended a polite argument I was having with him about journo writing by pointing this out… as a defense, suggesting that he did not have any need to be objective, just because a bunch of charlatans removed it “officially” from the job specs.
Sure, pure objectivity is not possible; but the problem is that so-called “reporting” has become saturated with biased and partisan opinion.
I.e., the opinion of the reporter or the opinion of the media organ for whom the reporter reports, which are usually the same thing given the nature of the polarization and partisanship that has infected the media.
IOW, too much journalism is “merely” ONE CONTINUAL op-ed piece—usually tilting the scales in one direction only, given the current state of the “profession”.
And so, fairness?
Accuracy?
Professionalism?
Benefit of the doubt?
Mitigating aspects?
Both sides of the question?
Forgeddaboudit. The article must fit the narrative.
It’s no longer even a question of objectivity (which is a bit of a red herring, actually). It’s a question of truthfulness. Of accuracy. Of honesty.
It’s as though during a week-long cold snap, the weather is described as “balmy with higher-than-average temperatures”. Why? Because of the Climate-Change narrative that MUST BE MAINTAINED. (Actually, in this case, the warmer weather MUST BE ASCRIBED to “climate change”(TM).)
Or a team that lost a baseball or football game is reported as having won it. Why? Because that team has more LFQFBTIEC<EWY players or POC on it. The NARRATIVE MUST BE MAINTAINED.
Or a politician (or political party) that has been framed, slandered and demonized using false charges deserves to continue to be framed, slandered and demonized because…well, because THAT'S THE WAY IT IS! and the NARRATIVE MUST BE MAINTAINED.
Or a country that had several people massacred by a terrorist is described as being, fundamentally, the cause of that attack, which attack itself is described as the act of an "armed activist" or "freedom fighter", since the country whose citizens were killed is a country that has no legitimacy and must be erased. The NARRATIVE MUST BE MAINTAINED.
So the problem is not the jettisoning of "objectivity".
The problem is the OFFICIALLY AUTHROIZED jettisoning of accuracy, honesty and fairness by intentionally disguising such values as, or intentionally confusing them with, "objectivity".
Hubris isn’t just an unappealing personality trait. It’s a tragic flaw. It contains the seeds of destruction.
The news media destroyed its credibility when its people began to believe that they were smarter, more moral, more worthy than their audience. They believe that they are uniquely qualified to determine what we should know, how we should vote, what policies are good and proper. They believe that they and their like-minded friends should rule over the rest of us.
They fumbled their humble. And it has destroyed them.
Their friends in Big Tech are just as bad. Perhaps even worse. https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2023/01/31/whoa-googleleaks-tells-twitterfiles-to-hold-its-beer-with-bombshell-filled-thread/
I was surprised by this news item. The Columbia Journalism Review complains about Russiagate coverage.
Say it ain’t so. Will anyone care?
President Thomas Jefferson was maligned viciously by the opposition press during his presidency.
This is what he thought of them: “…my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by retraining it to true facts and sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situation to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day…..I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
Some things, apparently, never change.
@Stan: “They fumbled their humble. And it has destroyed them.”
Great phrasing. ++++