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February 17, 2005
The facts-values dichotomy...
Dichotomies make the world easy to understand in a yin-yang sort of way, i.e. we understand a thing in terms of its opposite--indeed, the opposite is necessary for differentiation to occur in this view.
For the sake of understanding, I have discussed objectivity in journalism as a choice between stance (objective idealism) and procedure (journalistic practice). This allows me to separate and highlight what has been important to understanding and practicing objective journalism since the late 1800s. We cannot experience the world as it is, we can only understand it as we are built to experience it with our human senses. And we understand sense data--consciously or not--filtered through human culture.
Accepting this helps us bracket objective idealism out of the argument over what objective journalism should be. We may now deal with objectivity as procedure without all that nonsense about it being an "impossible but worthy goal" (the impossible can't be evaluated as worthy because it is impossible and, therefore, unknowable). The problem has been that, for many reasons (an objectivist epistemology mostly), many journalists can't seem to make this step. We continue to see a blurring of the dichotomy's boundary in discussions of journalistic objectivity.
There is another way to discuss it--a way that creates another dichotomy: between "facts" and "values."
I have avoided discussing this dichotomy because I think it creates confusion about objectivity precisely because the terms of the dichotomy are not precise, i.e. we can't agree on what they indicate. At first it may seem that the two dichotomies are related because "facts" appear to correspond to stance. The epistemology of journalism understands something called "facts" to be aspects of the world. We merely have to look. And "values" appear to correspond to procedure, which is a human reaction to the world as it is. The problem is that both facts and values are human constructs, and they are difficult to separate as we move to levels of complexity and abstraction above mere measuring.
For a pragmatic practice such as journalism, this facts-values dichotomy works in the sense that it fits the epistemology. But it allows--and even encourages--fuzzy-headed notions of "worthy but impossible" goals in regard to objectivity. In other words, fighting the good fight between facts and values is supposed to lead us to the impossible. It leads us, instead, further from understanding.
I contend our noetic field (the epistemology/rhetoric of a culture) is changing. We may see this change in the beginnings of a metaphor shift from "journalism as lecture" to "journalism as conversation." This is no small deal. Journalism is, I would argue, the most important discoursive practice in our culture. Now that citizens may speak back (blogs, i-net) and force a conversation, the epistemology and rhetoric--the noetic field--must change.
Posted by acline at February 17, 2005 9:03 AM | | Spotlight