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October 29, 2004

Interest and objectivity...

What qualities the adjective "objective" refers to in journalism remain deeply confused to the detriment of the profession and our society. This is evident in an excellent essay by Doug McGill, published on PressThink. (A full version of the essay may be found here. My remarks are confined to the edited version from PressThink.) He says of objectivity:

It has at its heart the noble aim of presenting indisputable facts upon which everyone in society can agree, and build upon towards the goal of a better society. Unfortunately, the ideal of objectivity has in practice in today’s newsrooms become a subtle but powerful means of self-censorship. It’s a conglomeration of contradictory practices that serve the purpose of rationalization as often as investigation. It has become a crutch for journalistic practices that work against civic aims.

I wish he had not used the term "ideal." McGill is not trying to talk about the philosophical ideal (one cause of much of the confusion in the profession)--although he confuses his terms at many points. For the most part, he identifies what it is objectivity meant when it was adopted as a quality of journalistic practice in the 1880s (during the rise of the research university, naturalism in art/culture, and a general social privileging of scientific ways of knowing--a noetic field similar to our own). Here we see some of the confusion:

At the same time, however, like the ideals of love and justice, neither is the definition of objectivity at all clear, nor shared by all, nor has the route to achieving the goals attached to any of the possible definitions of objectivity ever been clearly defined in practical, repeatable terms.

We think of objectivity as meaning neutral. But also balanced. Impartial. Non-partisan. Accurate. Verified. Fair. Factual. Unemotional. Detached. Scientific. Reasoned. Unbiased.

I disagree. The essentials of a definition are clear when the term is properly bracketed to identify a process rather than a philosophical stance. And there is a language for it, i.e. the academic code used by those of us who regularly discuss it as a readily identifiable thing. I do not mean to suggest 4 out of 5 eggheads agree. But we do have a language to discuss it, and we are able to limit that discussion to an extent far greater than McGill supposes. (Disagreement within the profession also serves certain political and sociological goals, but that's another discussion.)

Yes, I'm being picky, but I have a good reason for it. Journalists must clearly separate in their minds the ideal of objectivity as a stance from the interested, science-based objectivity as process. And this is, really, the problem McGill is discussing.

Why must journalists clearly separate these two ideas of objectivity? Because, as McGill points out in a series of rhetorical questions, the corrupted objectivity is making a mess of journalistic practice:

Are we served as citizens of a democracy when reporters feel their job is done, merely to report "both sides" of a given public issue? What if the reporter, himself or herself, was deeply convinced--or would be deeply convinced if he or she took the time to look into the issue more closely--that one or another of the side in the argument was right? That is, that one or the other side had the actual facts of the matter on their side? Would it be the reporter’s obligation then, to point this out?

Deeply convinced. Sound like bias? It should not. Wasn't Einstein deeply convinced about what his observations and calculations--an objective process--told him about reality leading to the Theory of Relativity? Wasn't Neils Bohr? Or Marie Curie? Or Richard Feynman? Or Stephen Hawking?

Journalists convinced themselves, instead, not to search deeply for the facts or to evaluate according to the facts the assertions of their sources because this supposedly indicates interest--and isn't science supposed to be disinterested, i.e. objective according to the philosophical ideal? Wasn't Einstein interested? Or any of the others I named? Do we really suppose that they spent their lives chasing the very nature of reality with no interest in what it is they found and claimed? The interest that drove them was the desire to discover how reality works and describe it so that we may harness the power of such knowledge. Isn't this what journalists are supposed to do: discover how society works and describe it so that we the people may harness the power of such knowledge to make our society run well?

I think it is. And I think we'll get there.

Other highlights of this essay include McGill's descriptions of actual reporting and writing practised on deadline with aim of making the front page. And he ends the essay with a plea for a more interested journalism.

Do I really have to say it? Go read the whole thing.

Posted by acline at October 29, 2004 11:18 AM | | Spotlight