by Marcy Burstiner
Journalists are trained to be objective. But what does that mean and where did that idea come from? And is it achievable?
In the world of traditional journalism, reporters were supposed to be objective. That meant that they were supposed to report without bias. You might personally believe everyone has the right to an abortion or believe that abortion is wrong, but your reporting and how you write or tell the story couldn’t reflect that.
Objectivity has seemed to all but disappear in the digital age. The thing is, it only became an ethical practice in the 20th century. The idea of objectivity in journalism was born out of a business decision.
The telegraph was invented in 1847 and the wiring of the United States and its territories began soon after. That allowed news of the Mexican American war and later the U.S. Civil War to spread far, fast.
At the time, there were newspapers in just about every town, and multiple newspapers in the bigger cities. They all competed for readers and the way they did that was by styling their news to the prejudices of their different audiences — or vice versa.
You subscribed to a newspaper because the publisher of that paper pretty much thought the same way you did. Sound familiar? People in the United States tend to tune into Fox News if they are conservative or MSNBC if they are liberal. In Great Britain you might subscribe to The Spectator for a conservative bent. In Belgium, left leaning readers might subscribe to De Morgen or La Libre.
Do we need all those reporters?
Back in the mid-1800s publishers realized that with the telegraph every news outlet would be reporting on the same big stories.
That got them thinking: Why should we each pay reporters to cover the same story? Why not share the story and cut the costs by having only one reporter cover it?
But that meant that the same story would go in the conservative papers AND the liberal ones. The ones that were pro-slavery and those that were anti-slavery. To share the story and cut their costs, the publishers had to agree that the story would be cleansed of bias. Hence the birth of objectivity in journalism.
But in the digital age, it doesn’t cost a lot to have reporters cover the same stories. You don’t have to send someone across the country by slow train or horseback. Reporters can call or zoom anyone in the world anytime. And with endless publications — because it doesn’t cost much to publish online — news outlets are super competitive.
To get eyeballs and subscribers and followers and likes, your reporting must be original. An easy way to make something original is to toss in some original bias.
Why be objective?
So is there an ethical reason to be objective? That depends on how you define objectivity. I’ve long believed that people who claim to be truly objective are being dishonest, because it is impossible to wipe your mind of your biases.
In many cases you don’t even know you are biased. There are whole books written on the idea of hidden biases. I’ve known men who insist they are feminist but their actions speak otherwise and people who convince themselves they are egalitarian but still fight against low income housing in their neighborhoods.
The important thing is to try to recognize your biases, confront them, and disclose them to readers or listeners. You can still cover a story that has to do with abortion, but let readers know where you stand on it. I’ve been a business reporter and told the corporate bigwigs I interviewed that I am pretty anti-big business.
Once they knew where I stood they could defend themselves against my way of thinking. It made them trust me more knowing where I stood than if they thought I might be hiding how I thought.
It is essential to try to see things through different perspectives. How would I think about abortion if I were deeply Catholic? How might I think about an issue if I were of a different race or social strata or culture or age? Can I ask the questions those people might ask?
It is impossible to be truly objective, too, since it disappears the second you choose a story to report. When you decide that covering the environment is more important than reporting on how taxes are hurting people, you show a preference. If you decide to report a story about animal abuse in the food industry instead of one about the high cost of meat, you show a bias.
So just as you should report from multiple perspectives, can you choose your stories from those multiple perspectives as well? If you are well off, can you choose to report stories relevant to poor people? If you are white can you choose to report a story important to people of color?
Many people complain that they don’t follow the news because much of what they see on the news feeds isn’t relevant to them and that it seems to be all the same.
Recognizing your biases and breaking out of them to enfold other perspectives into the stories you choose to report and the questions you ask is the best way of getting a bigger and more diverse audience.
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