Onward rhetorical soldiers…
I have written many times on Rhetorica about objectivity and what it means, and should mean, to journalists. But there is one sense of objectivity that I have failed to discuss in detail (not that this entry qualifies as “detail”). This sense of objectivity is closely related to objectivity as a process of reporting. It is objectivity as a process of writing, i.e. the rhetorical conventions or devices journalists use to create a standard product.
The current ethos of objectivity arose at the same time as the German model of higher education in the late 1800s, which promoted Wissenschaft–scholarly and scientific research aimed at understanding the world as it is. The noetic field shifted during this era. The rhetoric of the age, quite in line with the needs of the emerging scientific-industrial age, privileged expository prose based on objective processes of observation and information gathering from authoritative sources.
The wretched 5-paragraph essay form you learned in English composition is a shadow of the classic model bastardized to fit the needs of the new noetic field. The inverted pyramid form of arrangement in journalism arose at the same time for the same reason. This noetic field is the source of the academic essay (or term paper) as we understand it today, the purpose of which is to present knowledge gained from objective processes in a way that may be learned and/or tested by the reader. The voice is nearly always third-person–a rhetorical stance to subordinate the author to the knowledge.
This stance is changing in academia somewhat because, I believe, the noetic field is changing. And this means journalism must and will change.
But if you check out the textbooks I’m using this semester, you’ll find that the old rhetorical stance is still very much evident. Wait a minute…”very much evident”? The old rhetorical stance is still the standard. Journalists use rhetorical conventions (such as third-person voice, heavy quoting of authoritative sources and language choices that attempt to avoid evaluation) to persuade readers that their articles may be trusted for many of the same reasons an academic paper may be trusted.
Do you see the glaring problem?
Journalists operate with a set of assumptions about language that I think no longer obtain. Or, to state it less forcefully, these language conventions have sustained much damage in the rhetorical and intellectual battle that is the changing noetic field.
Blogging carries equal weight with the final? Aren’t you Mr. Cuttingedge!
I don’t like finals
Do you look at, as part of the noetic field, some basic assumptions about knowledge? For instance, parliamentary government is based on the assumption that a group of smart people trying to solve a problem will, through deliberation, generally find a good solution. That is, that good ideas will defeat bad ideas through a deliberative process. I don’t think people believe that anymore.
Second, the academic and journalistic prose that you describe rests on an assumption that reason and experiment are the way to describe the universe. Many (possibly most) people I know have effectively rejected reason, saying that people believe what they want to believe, and that reason is just justification for what your biases tell you.
The journalists themselves are as likely to have these views as their readers; they are using a form that assumes things they don’t believe themselves. That leads, I think, to the hesaid-shesaid problem, where the writer doesn’t expect the reader to seriously evaluate the claims, nor does the writer expect the ‘truth’ to eventually emerge from the argument.
Or maybe I’m just cranky this morning.
,
-V.
When the New York freakin’ Times whomps up a web of connections that would do the John Birch Society proud, the “ethos of objectivity” is in trouble, all right.
Quibbles: