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August 6, 2004

Three cheers for objectivity...

Journalists live in towns and cities and rural areas. They pay taxes and medical bills and bar tabs. They drive on roads and fly on planes and walk on municipal sidewalks. Journalists are citizens, too.

I've always found this a rather odd little quirk--journalists who avoid voting or displaying other civic virtues, as if these things somehow sully their objectivity. But I suppose the effort, misguided and unnecessary as it is, speaks well of journalistic ethics in general. Journalists are nothing if not a professional class of ethical hand-wringers. (That's not to suggest they always reach the ethical heights they set for themselves.)

Those few who eschew overt displays of citizenship have a point: How can one credibly argue objectivity when one plays the civic game--a game with partisan opponents and winners and losers (assuming for the moment a zero-sum game)?

I have two answers to that question, neither of which is adequate to dispell the partisan game of ranting about news media bias. But before I give you those answers, I think we must consider what happened yesterday at the Unity 2004 convention--a gathering of minority journalists:

Sen. John Kerry got an enthusiastic response Thursday from delegates to the Unity 2004 convention for minority journalists.

There was applause nearly 50 times during his address. There was laughter when he took a shot at the Bush administration by noting that "just saying there are weapons of mass destruction (in Iraq) doesn't make it so." He got a standing ovation at the end.

This is one of those moments that brings to mind an important question: What were they thinking?

Here's one possible answer from Akilah Johnson, a "night cops" reporter at the Sun-Sentinel in Delray Beach, Fla.: "I guess a lot of people were acting like citizens, not reporters."

Should we be worried about this display of citizenship? Ernest Sotomayor, president of Unity: Journalists of Color and Long Island editor of Newsday.com, said the reception "surprised me a little, but should not be viewed as an endorsement of him or his policies."

Uh-huh.

Without a doubt, journalists are citizens who enjoy--and should exercise with proper discretion--every right of citizenship. To argue otherwise may suggest something I find quite troubling: That journalists stand above citizenship. And if they stand above that, what else might they think themselves to be standing above?

But, at the same time, journalists are connected to politics as players as a normal course of professional practice. A journalist attending a professional convention is not off the job because they are attending as professionals. And they must comport themselves as professionals (at least until the evening parties begin). If I were an editor whose reporter cheered Kerry's speech, I'd be planning to have a hard talk with that person upon his/her return to the newsroom. I would defend his/her right to express themselves politically, but not as a journalist at a professional event covered by other news media during an election year.

A legitimate question is: Does political ideology affect news coverage? My answer is complicated and well-known by now. I contend that the structural biases of the profession are far more predictive of journalistic behavior than the ideology of individual journalists.

That said, let me be clear at this point: I find the collective behavior of these journalists quite troubling.

Now, let's revisit the original question: How can one credibly argue objectivity when one plays the civic game--a game with partisan opponents and winners and losers?

My two answers: (Note: I realize that all ideologies have political consequences. I'm writing a blog entry, not a book. So I must necessarily make some big leaps across some difficult terrain.)

1) First, journalists must scrub from their thinking the philosophical ideal of objectivity because it simply does not exist. We cannot know the world in and of itself. We can only know the world as humans are supposed to know it. And culture, with its attendant values, constitutes one of the important ways we know the world. We may certainly understand the world in ways that accurately describe it for the purpose of effective human interaction and manipulation, e.g. the sciences. Accepting any part of the philosophical ideal makes it impossible for journalists to act ethically because they can never reach the standard--not because of personal failure, but because the standard does not exist. What journalists do for the most part, however, is emulate the objectivity of the sciences by adopting procedures for accurately measuring and describing the world in human terms. As long as these procedures are scrupulously followed, reporters and editors may be thought of as "objective."

2) Every human being has a political ideology of some sort. But this ideology isn't necessarily the most important one, i.e. the ideology that an individual calls upon most (consciously or not) to understand the world. For example, religious ideology is most important for some people. For others, professional ideology trumps political ideology. The postmodernists were right about (at least) one thing: The self is a multiplicity of ideologies--some of them conflicting. For the most part, journalists who write for the news sections operate with a strong professional ideology (what I have called the structural biases). As long as this professional ideology remains stronger than political ideology in the course of professional practice, reporters and editors may be thought of as "objective."

Posted by acline at August 6, 2004 9:35 AM | | Spotlight