[rad-green] The myth of media objectivity

*https://www.bookforum.com/print/2604/the-myth-of-media-objectivity-23759
<https://www.bookforum.com/print/2604/the-myth-of-media-objectivity-23759>Book
Forum          DEC/JAN 2020*

Both Sides Now
<https://www.bookforum.com/print/2604/the-myth-of-media-objectivity-23759>
*The myth of media objectivity*
MARISSA BROSTOFF <https://www.bookforum.com/contributor/marissa-brostoff>
THE VIEW FROM SOMEWHERE: UNDOING THE MYTH OF JOURNALISTIC OBJECTIVITY BY
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE. CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. 240 PAGES. $25.

[image: The cover of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of
Journalistic Objectivity]

Shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the journalist Lewis Raven
Wallace posted a short piece on Medium with the provocative title
“Objectivity is dead, and I’m okay with it.” In those first surreal days of
the new regime, mainstream media outlets were reacting to Trump’s
shock-and-awe tactics by doubling down on their own self-regard. Even as
they rushed to normalize the new administration, news purveyors like the *New
York Times* and NPR suggested that their own unbiased, verifiable
content—in a word, their objectivity—was the best antidote to the
president’s unchecked mendacity.

Wallace—who worked, at the time, as a reporter for the nationally
syndicated public radio show *Marketplace*—disagreed. He questioned the
liberal media’s insistence that journalistic objectivity was a noble
aspiration, let alone an achievable goal, at a moment marked by grotesque
injustice and escalating terror. Wallace used himself as an example. As a
transgender writer, how could he possibly serve as an unbiased observer of
political forces arrayed against his existence? Instead of striving for an
impossible neutrality, he argued, journalists should be unapologetic about
the political nature of their task. “As the status quo in this country
shifts,” he wrote, “we must decide whether we are going to shift with it.”
Wallace’s post circulated over social media and was spotted by his bosses
at  *Marketplace*. A few days later, he was fired.

In *The View from Somewhere*, Wallace responds to his dismissal with a
thoughtfully researched series of essays on journalistic objectivity,
placing himself squarely on the side of the concept’s malcontents. While
the tone of his original blog post was affirmative, emphasizing the role of
the journalist as a public servant, his book paints an often damning
picture of a news industry that uses the rhetoric of neutrality to serve
the powerful. Historically and today, Wallace argues, media outlets have
sought out the perspectives of writers unmarked by social difference or
radical ideas, granting these perspectives the status of unfiltered reality
and tagging writers outside this narrow frame as inherently biased. In
times of crisis, he suggests, it should become only more obvious to us that
this kind of sophistry amounts to moral failure.

In the early years of laboratory science in Restoration England, one method
of establishing an experiment’s validity was to secure the presence of
gentlemen witnesses. These self-appointed natural philosophers were not
expected to possess special technical knowledge. In fact, as Donna Haraway
writes, the ostensibly generic quality of their gaze—“modern, European,
masculine, scientific”—was the whole point. For Haraway, the “modest
witness,” whose social stature gave him the privilege to disappear into his
observations, was key to the invention of scientific objectivity. When he
wrote down his laboratory notes, “his narratives ha[d] a magical power—they
los[t] all trace of their history as stories.” *The View from Somewhere *is
in large part about the construction of the journalist as a kind of
contemporary modest witness. Wallace’s own experiences with the
slipperiness of scientific objectivity—he notes that he was diagnosed in
2005 with gender identity disorder, which would cease to exist as a medical
category by 2013—help to inform his critique of media pieties. He shows how
journalistic objectivity, a seemingly self-evident ideal with its own
scientific aspirations, was in fact assembled gradually out of specific
technical practices marshaled toward the maintenance of the status quo.

Wallace makes his case by carefully tracing the history of so-called
objectivity in journalism. His story begins in the 1830s with the birth of
the penny newspaper. Where newspapers had once been the organs of political
parties and business interests, this new kind of mass-circulation daily,
funded by advertising and pitched to a growing urban working class, was
independent. But what did journalistic independence look like? For some
newspapermen, it meant the freedom to engage in active political combat
along the lines of principle rather than party affiliation. Horace Greeley,
the legendary founding editor of the *New-York Tribune*, placed
abolitionism at the center of the *Tribune*’s mission and disdained the
“gagged, mincing neutrality” of outlets that took a less determined stance.
But other nineteenth-century publications touted their impartiality and
established the signposts that would come to announce as much: boundaries
between the publishing and editorial sides of a newspaper, and between news
and opinion sections; sourcing and fact-checking; the “inverted pyramid”
structure of news stories, in which the most important information appears
at the top (hence the injunction not to “bury the lede”). In the early
twentieth century, this model became dominant as journalism
professionalized. Early guides to journalistic ethics called for newspapers
to model their craft on the scientific method, and they did.

Media outlets, Wallace writes, “adopted ‘objectivity’ first as an
aspiration, but they transformed it too quickly into a bludgeon, a weapon
to regulate who gets to tell stories.” When newspapers created rules
against accepting bribes from sources, they protected the integrity of
their journalism. But when they adopted policies forbidding conflicts of
interest “real or perceived,” they got into the murkier territory of
adjudicating the *appearance *of impartiality. The language of objectivity
became a euphemistic way for outlets to dismiss reporting—and, crucially,
reporters—that made them uneasy, often on the basis of race or gender. An
1894 *New York Times *editorial rewarded Ida B. Wells for her
groundbreaking investigative work on lynching by calling her “a slanderous
and nasty-minded mulattress.” In 1990, the *Los Angeles Times *media critic
David Shaw could ask, with faux politesse, “Can Women Reporters Write
Objectively on Abortion Issue?”

This double standard became particularly insidious in the hands of
conservative media magnate Henry Luce. “Show me a man who thinks he’s
objective, and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself,” Luce remarked
in 1923, when he cofounded *Time*. The idea that *no one *could be
objective may at first glance appear democratizing, but in fact this kind
of cynicism only exacerbated the problems with the discourse of
journalistic neutrality, doubling down on the media’s gatekeeping function.
If objectivity is both desirable and impossible, the role of the modest
witness becomes rarefied, granted to or withheld from the job candidate at
will. Journalistic objectivity, then, is a labor issue. In this kind of
newsroom, Wallace argues, “the trick wasn’t to aspire to fairness, truth,
and nonpartisanship—it was to not be caught by your boss being a human with
opinions, especially if those opinions went against the grain in some way.”

This trap has been remarkably durable. I worked as a reporter from 2007
through 2010, and my modesty remained unquestioned until, near the end of
my time as a staff writer at Tablet, a Jewish Web magazine then tacking
sharply to the right, I was told a piece I’d written about Israeli American
anti-Zionist college students would require dramatic revision because it
had “an agenda.” I stood up for my own objectivity—the piece was properly
sourced and featured dissenting voices and expert data—and my boss switched
gears. “No one is objective,” she told me pityingly, as though it were the
first day of class at a low-ranked J-school.

Something snapped in that exchange: the clubby mutual recognition of the
strangeness of journalism and the people who perform it, straining toward
the paradox of achieving *objectivity through subjectivity *like mad
scientists. Suddenly all that was left was a wage relation, and because I
was twenty-five and about to quit for grad school, I chose that moment to
bring up my discovery that a junior male coworker was making a salary much
higher than my own. My boss laughed and asked what recourse I thought I
had. “You’re not in a union,” she said. Questions of journalistic
independence and media organizing are inextricable, and Wallace’s book is
in part a history of the latter, from the first known newsroom strike, in
1935 at the black New York paper the *Amsterdam News*, through a series of
Supreme Court cases that have addressed speech protections for journalist
organizers. Since the 1930s, Wallace reports, publishers have resisted
journalists’ demands for union recognition in part through the astonishing
claim that “union members could not be objective.” Sometimes the ruling
class protests too much.

In Wallace’s telling, the ideology of journalistic neutrality in the US
reached its apex during the liberal consensus of the postwar period, then
suffered a serious blow during the Vietnam War, when even “the most basic
facts” about the conflict were up for grabs. In the 1970s, right-wing think
tanks and politicians took up the language of objectivity with a vengeance,
systematically accusing media outlets of shilling for the Left and
successfully pushing them to the right; public media outlets like NPR and
PBS, which rely on insecure sources of government funding, have been
particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack. As his story moves into the
present, Wallace persuasively argues that collective action can remedy
traditional reporting’s blind spots. Black Lives Matter, for instance, has
transformed coverage of police brutality from local “crime” stories into
inescapably political national news. He also draws attention to the work of
lesser-known groups, like Indigenous Rising Media, working to develop
reporting techniques that allow journalists to collaborate with
marginalized communities rather than merely “extracting” their stories for
consumption.

When it comes to the work of individual journalists, though, Wallace is too
quick to treat “perspective” as something self-explanatory, emanating
directly from a writer’s social position. In reality, a writer’s point of
view consists of more than her relationship to structures of power; she
crafts her ideas through her prose. *The View from Somewhere* profiles a
range of exceptional journalists; perhaps my favorite was Sandy Nelson, a
beloved lesbian socialist reporter at the *Tacoma News Tribune *who was
reassigned to the copy desk when new management decided to punish her for
doing activist work while off the clock (she sued, and her case made it to
the Washington Supreme Court, which found against her). But because Wallace
does not attend to an irreducible element of journalism—the writing—all his
subjects wind up sounding a lot like Wallace. Ironically, the neglect of
texture homogenizes the very diversity the book is meant to champion. Even
a chapter on “Public Radio Voice” has almost nothing to say about voices,
beyond basic observations about NPR’s whiteness; indeed, much of the book
is itself written in public radio voice, sometimes lending it the quality
of a podcast that has become sentient and begun to inquire into its own
origins.

Come the revolution, what formal elements of news journalism’s objective
style will we want to preserve, and where do we want to experiment? How can
perspective be communicated in a way that acknowledges our entanglements,
as Donna Haraway would put it, without self-reflection taking over? I would
happily read a book that engaged with these questions; for now, the
journalism must speak for itself.

*Marissa Brostoff
<https://www.bookforum.com/contributor/marissa-brostoff> is the culture
editor at* Jewish Currents.

-- 

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sid-l" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sid-l/CACKppcygQobFXNHT_r4mWQsvEugPcDcWM1-cJgLzM9kMnQYg_Q%40mail.gmail.com.

---
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
List help: <https://riseup.net/lists>