Everyone interested in both the media and academe should read the Rutgers historian David Greenberg’s article in the most recent issue of Liberties, “The War on Objectivity in American Journalism.” Greenberg criticizes a trend he sees having emerged over the period since Trump’s election. Reporters and media scholars alike have begun attacking “objectivity” — from the early 20th century a badge of professional honor among the press — as an outdated idea, inadequate to the moral and political emergencies of our moment.
Greenberg provides a handful of high-profile examples. Here’s Wesley Lowery, formerly a reporter at The Washington Post and now a TV journalist, tweeting in 2020: “American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity'-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.” Lewis Raven Wallace, author of an academic book on the subject, likewise calls for the replacement of old norms of objectivity with “a moral stance.” Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at NYU, asserts that the Trump era means that journalists “will have to explain to the public that Trump is a special case, and the normal rules do not apply.” Then there’s Emily Wilder, fired from her job at the Associated Press for tweeting, with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “‘Objectivity’ feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report news implicitly stake a claim.”
Greenberg is suspicious of such statements — Wilder’s, he says, is both “convoluted and sophomoric.” And indeed, it is often hard to figure out just what any given critic of journalistic objectivity means. What makes the suspension of “normal rules” something other than an excuse to propagandize for one’s own political position? How can we achieve “moral clarity” when we don’t know the facts? What would a nonobjective “moral stance” in journalism look like?
In 1996, during an earlier round of disputes over journalistic objectivity, the Georgetown philosopher Judith Lichtenberg argued that “We cannot coherently abandon the ideal of objectivity, and ... whatever they may think, objectivity’s critics do not abandon it either.” Lichtenberg notes the conceptual muddle that many critics of objectivity find themselves in: “Some say that journalism is not objective; others that it cannot be objective; and still others that it should not be objective. Odd as it may seem, sometimes the same critic seems to be making all of these charges at the same time.” In her view, if critics of objectivity understood their own position better, they would realize that they are arguing for more, or better, objectivity, not subjectivity or slant.
Here are a few of what I take to be Lichtenberg’s main contentions. First, since critiques of media bias are themselves dependent on a background notion of “objectivity,” they affirm the concept they imagine they reject. (When Wilder says that “the basic terms we use to report the news implicitly stake a claim,” her complaint only makes sense if she can imagine coming up with less partial — more objective — terms.) Second, and relatedly, critics of objectivity are often mired in “confusion between objectivity and the appearance of objectivity.” (Lowery attacks “both-sides journalism” in the name of an attack on objectivity, but he is really attacking neutrality, which is different. As Lichtenberg says, “Between truth and falsehood the objective investigator is not neutral.”) Third, many interesting questions — of interpretation and emphasis, for instance — might remain undecidable, but that’s no knock on objectivity per se; indeed, the range of interpretations is constrained by facts objectively agreed upon. “It is no surprise,” Lichtenberg writes, “to find that the same events have different significance for people of varying histories, cultures or interests. We might put this point by saying that [such issues] go beyond the question of objectivity, but they do not subvert objectivity.”
Part of the problem, as Lichtenberg observes, is that journalistic objectivity refers to two separate but related things: an ideal on the one hand and a set of methods meant to help the journalist approach that ideal on the other. Those methods — a calm, dispassionate tone; seeking comment from different sides of a quarrel, etc. — can produce the appearance of objectivity without the real thing. Often, critics of objectivity are actually critics of the misleading deployment of the rhetorical forms associated with it. Lowery’s case for “moral clarity,” as Greenberg describes, seems to have been triggered by a quarrel with his bosses at the Post about the tone of his political tweets. For Lowery, moral clarity required abandoning the studied pose of the reporter.
Greenberg’s critique of objectivity’s critics can itself be clarified with some of these distinctions in mind. Greenberg accuses thinkers from Michel Foucault to Noam Chomsky of playing variations on what he calls a “crude theme": “that the pose of neutrality reinforced the status quo — that objectivity was a disguise for power.” But this theme is only as crude as its treatment. And in Chomsky’s case at least, it would be more accurate to say that the rhetoric of objectivity can be a disguise for power; there is no one less relativistic about the hardness of facts than Chomsky. That is why, in Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and his co-author, Edward S. Herman, can speak of “nominal” versus “substantive” objectivity. As Lichtenberg observes, with Chomsky specifically in mind, “some of the sharpest critics of the press” make their case “without calling into question the possibility of objectivity.”
Read David Greenberg’s “The War on Objectivity in American Journalism,” here, and Judith Lichtenberg’s “In Defense of Objectivity Revisited,” here.
