Authorities in the news industry, whose reputation is near a record low, have a novel idea to restore public faith in their work: They say they can improve trust by renouncing objectivity.
This is not something that would have occurred to me.
In a recent column in the Washington Post, the paper’s former executive editor, Leonard Downie, said that in the quarter-century he was a top editor, he “never understood what ‘objectivity’ meant.”
Illustration: Mountain People
The piece quoted other notable journalists as saying much the same.
“Objective by whose standard?” it quoted a former executive editor of The Associated Press as asking.
Downie said that “truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever ‘objectivity’ once meant to produce more trustworthy news.”
Younger journalists seem to get it, he said.
A generational shift appears to be under way, he said, adding that it cannot happen too soon.
More trustworthy news would certainly be good.
In the 1970s, about 70 percent of Americans said they trusted the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “report the news fully, accurately and fairly.”
The figure now stands at 34 percent.
Other polls report similar findings, including one study that found trust in news media in the US is the lowest of all 46 countries surveyed.
Admittedly, it is not obvious what this decline really means. Are the media less worthy of trust, or are readers less trusting?
In the US, increasing polarization makes the second plausible. Still, there is something to the first as well.
The issue is not whether newspapers are seen to be neutral. For instance, it is fine that the New York Times is a liberal newspaper — and it should be less embarrassed by this than it has sometimes seemed.
My career in journalism started in the UK, which has brazenly partisan newspapers.
You cannot imagine the Guardian backing the Tories or the Telegraph supporting Labour.
Again, that is fine, but the proper and unashamed tilt of their opinion writing and editorializing is, or should be, separate from whether their reporting of news can be trusted.
I find that I read political news in the New York Times and Washington Post more cautiously than I used to.
It is not that I suspect outright deliberate falsehoods. It is more that I see a pattern of choosing and framing narratives that downplay or omit things I have to learn elsewhere.
The most obvious recent example was the effort to dismiss and then ignore the contents of what, in fact, turned out to be the laptop of US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
However, I also detect a reluctance to discuss the pros and cons of measures to improve election integrity, interrogate the “settled science” of climate change, or present a thorough and dispassionate accounting of the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On matters such as these, it is as though the lack of trust runs in both directions.
It seems I cannot be trusted with information that might lead me to jump to the wrong conclusion. This tendentious crafting of the news might be well-intentioned — in part a conscious effort, deemed necessary to cope with Donald Trump as US presidential candidate and then US president, to steer clear of “misinformation,” “false equivalence” and “both-sidesism.”
That said, I do not appreciate it, and it does not inspire confidence.
Jeff Gerth, a distinguished former reporter for the New York Times, in January published a 24,000-word article in the Columbia Journalism Review examining “the press versus the president.”
His exhaustive account of the reporting of “Russiagate” and other Trump scandals fully supports his main conclusion — that “journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work.”
Striving to be objective in reporting news — a goal now disavowed by some of the profession’s leading lights — has been one of those norms.
This rejection of objectivity would be easier to understand (albeit still wrong) if it were part of a larger skepticism about the possibility of truth.
What is so confusing about Downie’s position is that objectivity and truth, in the ordinary meaning of that term, stand or fall together. It is nonsense to want one — news reporters should pursue truth, he said — but not the other.
Objectivity calls for detachment, for a relating of facts “uncolored by feelings, opinions or personal bias,” as my dictionary puts it.
Downie and other doubters seem influenced by the school of thought that says it is impossible to report in such a way. Relating facts involves selecting, arranging and interpreting them.
These processes and their outcomes, whether we are aware of it or not, are socially dependent, guided or even determined by outside factors.
These might reflect one’s “lived experience,” as many now like to say, or the conditions of production, as Karl Marx wrote, or systemic racism, as critical race theory puts it.
At any rate, there can be no neutral or objective presentation of facts.
The trouble is that all these objections apply with equal force to truth.
If “objective by whose standard?” refutes objectivity as a principle, then “whose truth?” does the same for what is or might be true. If objectivity is meaningless, then by similar reasoning, truth is illusory. There is no truth, only your truth and my truth.
If, on the other hand, truth in the ordinary meaning of the term is possible, as most journalists still appear to believe, then it is capable of being sought, and there is after all something to be objective about.
Granted, adopting a uniformly skeptical position — objectivity is meaningless and truth is socially constructed — would be less obviously self-contradictory, not to mention a tremendous time-saver. All those fact-checking operations could be shut down because there are no actual facts, and appearing to suggest otherwise might be seen as baselessly claiming that objectivity is possible.
Obviously there would be no point in counting Trump’s lies — 30,753 false or misleading claims while he was president, a Washington Post tally showed — because Trump’s truth is presumably different from yours and mine, and who is to say which epistemic frame is valid.
Alternatively, we could agree that there is such a thing as truth in the ordinary meaning of the word, and that setting the truth before readers is a vital public service. We could agree that politicians often tell lies, and we could applaud reporters for exposing them. We could agree that getting to the truth is harder than it might seem, in part because our efforts have to grapple with some of the factors that constructivists mention, while still insisting it is possible and worth the effort.
There is no question, for instance, that issues get neglected because readers prefer not to know, or have been taught not to care.
The US’ racial history and its contemporary legacy is replete with such cases, but this filtering can be overcome — not by casting doubt on the idea of truth, but by insisting on it. We should want to talk about redlining and its consequences, and when we do, we should want to judge rival claims according to whether they are true or false, not by asking whose truth they express.
With that understood, striving for objectivity becomes an intelligible and essential ambition that serves two further purposes.
First, it would make the truth more accessible, because the discipline of suspending feelings, opinions and personal bias opens the mind to “facts that run counter to the prevailing narrative,” Gerth said.
Second, it would give readers greater confidence in the news that is set before them.
On the whole, if reporters want to be trusted, I recommend truth and objectivity.
Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering economics. Previously, he was deputy editor of The Economist and chief Washington commentator for the Financial Times.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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