Is Objective Journalism Doomed?

Here is a blog post that debates whether or not there is a future for objective journalism in America:

http://timberry.bplans.com/2012/02/is-objective-journalism-doomed.html

Do you ever wonder what happened to objective journalism? I have a thought about that.
Until the web changed everything, we got our news from a very few sources: There was a newspaper or two in every city. There were three major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, offering television and radio news. There were a few independent channels in each market, both on radio and television. And there were the national magazines, Time, Life, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report.
What we called journalistic ethics back then were also good business. All of those major news providers had to stay objective in order to reach a commercially viable audience.
If Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley seemed biased, then nobody would have believed them. They had to stay in the middle to appeal to the general audience. Trust, professionalism, and credibility were the only way to make it big in news.
Sure, we also had the tabloids at the grocery store checkout counters, but nobody believed them. They didn’t depend on credibility to succeed, the way the major news sources did.
Today, however, the huge difference is that pulverization and special focus is everywhere. Newspapers are struggling but look at blogs and cable channels and the Huffington Post, and focus, even focus on a small portion of the political or economic spectrum, makes money, Consider Fox News on one hand and Huffington Post or all those absurdly extremist radio talk show hosts, and the handful of liberal ones too … they all make money by gathering an interest group or affinity group together, shutting out the outside world, or the objective real world, and talking only to believers.
As far as I can tell the traditional media, the ones I mentioned above, are still striving for objectivity. To the extent that they still exist. But they are steadily losing power, audience, and importance.

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Fox & MSNBC Became More Extreme As Election Day Neared, Reports Pew

Here is an article from Mediate discussing a study done by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism that showed became more "extreme" in their bias as the U.S. presidential election neared:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-msnbc-became-more-extreme-as-election-day-neared-reports-pew/

Rival cable news channels Fox News and MSNBC became even more “extreme” in their coverage of President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney during the the last week of the 2012 presidential campaign, says a new Pew study.
The study, released today by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, found that in the final week before election day, MSNBC’s negative coverage of Romney jumped to 68 percent, compared to the 57 percent negative coverage they gave him for most of October.
Fox News’ negative coverage of Obama increased to 56 percent in that final week from the 47 percent negative Obama coverage during October.
On the other hand, during the final pre-election week, MSNBC’s positive coverage of Obama shot up to 51 percent from 33 percent; and Fox News’ favorable Romney coverage went from 34 percent to 42 percent.
Full survey results here.

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Most Biased News Network Revealed In New Study

Here is an article from The Inquisitr discussing a study done by the Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism revealing who is the most biased network on television:

http://www.inquisitr.com/404737/most-biased-news-network-revealed-in-new-study/

The most biased news network may not be who you think it is. Given Fox News’ various snarky comments during the recent Presidential election many viewers may believe its well-known conservative slant has made it the most biased network on television. However, when it comes to slanting the news Fox is not the network that truly delivers only what its viewers want to hear. According to a study conducted by the non-partisan Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism, MSNBC (now NBCNews) receives that dubious distinction.
The Pew study analyzed stories surrounding President Obama and Mitt Romney and found that 71% of MSNBC’s stories showed a negative bias towards Romney, while only 46% of Fox’s stories about Obama had a negative bias. Journalism.org backs up the numbers and further adds that in overall coverage the media delivered Obama a biased edge over Romney.
In an effort to help viewers become more engaged and determine the truth for themselves Fair.org had a few suggestions. Their first suggestion is to consider the news’ sources. For instance, during the election the numbers show that MSNBC would now have made a good source for partisan news gathering because of too much of the sources reporters quoted were bias. For example interviewing a Democratic council member would be biased if a Republican council member was not interviewed for the same piece of reporting.
Fair.org suggests asking the following questions about your news network of choice: Does the company lack diversity? Do the on-air reporters reflect the fact that Americans are more than one color? Are any of the producers gay or lesbian? Are any of the writers Christian, Buddist or Jewish?
Experts note that the ultimate goal for a news network should be to share the views of different people. It is also suggested that viewers let news organizations know whenever they have a problem with the networks work.
Liberals will likely claim Fox News is the most biased news network while conservatives will typically point towards MSNBC, CNN and others. While MSNBC wins this distinction a recent study found that people who watch Fox News know less about actual news events then people who don’t watch the news at all. Ultimately determining the validity of a news stations content becomes the responsibility of the viewer.

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Objective Journalism Isn't Dead and Hasn't Been Replaced

Here is a post suggesting that objective journalism still has a viable place in society and that due to the fact it may be unobtainable does not mean that trying to achieve it is "without cause or benefit.":

http://www.groundreport.com/Business/Objective-Journalism-Isnt-Dead-and-Hasnt-Been-Repl/2925842

Octavia Nasr, CNN's Senior Middle East Editor, was fired last Wednesday after tweeting that she was sad at the passing of a Hezbollah leader. A CNN memo said that Nasr's credibility was irrepreply damaged. Nasr became the second victim of Israeli angst, following Helen Thomas' departure from Hearst last month.

Both of these exits have rejuvinated questions about journalistic objectivity and its place in the 21st century news ecosystem. With the rise of cable news and the establishment of the blogosphere, some have asked whether objectivity is dead or just drowned out. The deeper question of whether objectivity is a noble goal of journalism, however, remains unanswered.

In the 1920's, public relations yielded to the impossibility of absolute fact in the new social environment, and instead relied on subjectivity to shape this new world. Responding to the rise of the mob mentality, professionals “took public opinion to be irrational and therefore something to… manipulate, and control," Sociologist Michael Schudson argued in his book Discovering the News. Journalists countered the rise of public relations by creating professional schools that instilled in their young journalists notions of objectivity and the scientific method.

“Journalists came to believe in objectivity…, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt," Schudson wrote.

The turmoil of the 1960s created public distrust in the government. Racial injustice, Nixon's Watergate scandal, and the Vietnam War weighed heavily on the public's perception of government. While older reporters stressed objectivity, young reporters advocated interpretative reporting in response to the loss of public confidence in government. The critical culture fundamentally changed journalism and “straight society” news by promoting increased criticism, muckraking, and questioning of the government and official sources.

Yet, journalists--at least traditional journalists--are still guided by and influenced by a pursuit of objectivity and many see objectivity much as the founder of America's journalism schools saw it. Before becoming entirely disillusioned, Walter Lippmann, the namesake of this blog, suggested that liberty itself depended on objectivity.

"There seems to be no way of evading the conclusion that liberty is not so much permission as it is the construction of a system of information increasingly independent of opinion," Lippmann wrote in 1920. "In the long run it looks as if opinion could be made at once free and enlightening only by transferring our interest from 'opinion' to the objective realities from which it springs."

Today, however, opinion is made free by creating your own reality. Indeed, objective reality is somewhat a fool's wish. It is beyond what any one reporter can hope to achieve, but simply because it is unobtainable does not mean that the pursuit of it is without cause or benefit.

"The objectivity norm guides journalists to separate facts from values and to report only the facts," Schudson writes. "Objective reporting is supposed to be cool, rather than emotional, in tone... According to the objectivity norm, the journalist’s job consists of reporting something called ‘news’ without commenting on it, slanting it, or shaping its formulation in any way."

Conversely, critics argue that the objectivity norm simply allows journalists to be hamstrung into reporting each side without examining the truth behind the facts. Many argue that objectivity--along with fairness and balance--makes the journalist subservient to the public relations officer and the press conference. Some even blame the lack of press scrutiny in the run-up to the Iraq war on institutionalized objectivity.

"Our pursuit of objectivity can trip us up on the way to 'truth,'" Brent Cunningham argued in his well-regarded article Re-thinking Objectivity. "Objectivity excuses lazy reporting. If you're on deadline and all you have is "both sides of the story," that's often good enough."

In the past few years objectivity has taken its punches. A recent poll showed that almost 70% of Americans think that objective reporting is dead. More Americans are tuning into hear cable news pundits than their counterparts on the broadcast nightly news. In 2009, press accuracy hit a record low with only 29% of Americans reporting that the press gets the facts straight and 18% reporting that the press deals fairly with all sides.

There is still plenty of reasons to appreciate objective journalism, however. Indeed the traditional press continues to be the source of original information. In a case study of Baltimore, conducted by the Project for Excellence in journalism, research found that 95% of original content came from traditional news outlets--the stalwarts of objective journalism.

I think it is fair to say that democracy needs journalism, and journalism needs objective reporting. If objective reporting dies, the information that it uncovered once upon a time will remain covered. The investigative pieces will remain uninvestigated, and we will be worse off because of it. Opinions are fine, but if everyone is giving their opinion and no one is still in the business of reporting, then democracy is dead.

I would also argue that objective reporting, when done right, does not have to hamstring reporters. Instead, objectivity hand-in-hand with the dedicated journalists digging below the surface, can create a journalism that is both ruthless, dependable, and defensible. And while it isn't perfect, at least it's attempting to be.

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‘Objective’ journalism is over. Let’s move on.

Here is an article that suggests that objective journalism is over and that journalists should just state their own personal beliefs before writing articles so the public can "evaluate the quality of the information it is getting":

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/12/objective-journalism-is-over-lets-move.html

It’s time to retire the difficult-to-achieve and impossible-to-defend conceit that journalists are now, or ever were, objective.

Let’s replace this threadbare notion with a realistic and credible standard of transparency that requires journalists to forthrightly declare their personal predilections, financial entanglements and political allegiances so the public can evaluate the quality of the information it is getting.

This not only will make life easier for scribes and the public. It also could do wonders for the sagging credibility of the press. I’ll provide a specific suggestion for doing so in a moment. But first, let’s see how we got here:

It is preposterous to think anyone ever believed that journalists – who, for the most part, are restlessly intelligent and relentlessly skeptical individuals – actually were able to intellectually neuter themselves when they sat down at a keyboard or stepped in front of a camera.

So, the first step in being more transparent with readers, listeners and viewers is to be honest about the fact that the idea of objectivity is really more of an exception than the prevailing standard in the two centuries that journalism has been practiced in the United States

For most of the history of the republic, political partisans typically funded newspapers for the express purpose of promoting their friends and pummeling their enemies. Objectivity was not their objective.

As the newspaper industry began consolidating in the 20th Century, the sole surviving publishers in most markets realized they could sell more papers (and therefore, more ads) if they purged partisanship from their columns. Some publishers were more assiduous than others, but most of them played it relatively straight in the era after World War II.

Broadcasters embraced the concept of neutrality in the interests of building the largest possible audiences for their shows (so they, too, could sell more ads). As a welcome side benefit, this avoided potential unpleasantness with the federal officials who doled out broadcasting licenses.

This all worked fine until the Internet came along and provided self-appointed critics of every stripe with unlimited opportunities to vent their misgivings about the news – and the messengers delivering it.

Confidence in the media eroded accordingly.

A recent Gallup poll found that a record 57% of Americans said they had little or no trust in the mass media vs. 44% who were skeptical in 1999. While I don’t believe the traditional news media are materially less trustworthy today than they were 10 years ago, faith in the press has faltered, in part, because so many people are picking at it.

However, I would submit that the biggest reason distrust in the press has increased is that a growing number of journalists – particularly those on Fox News, MSNBC, talk radio and other popular venues – are expected to inject personality, passion and even partisan spin into their work.

This trend is unlikely to abate, as long as Fox News – which is about as fair and balanced as Roger Ailes is fit and trim – can pull a larger audience at 10 p.m. on election night than each of ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and NBC. If anything, the passion for passion is likely to grow.

With on-air histrionics at a fever pitch, distrust has spilled over to the print media, too, contributing to a pernicious decline in newspaper readership that has dropped circulation by 37% in the last 20 years. Today, only one in three households actually takes a newspaper.

Unsettling as the punditization of the news may be to old-school journalists, there is a powerful cultural reason why Fox, Jon Stewart and other news-with-a-view productions have caught on: Consumers are so overloaded with information that they want someone to tell them what it means.

No fewer than 92% of Americans today “use multiple platforms to get their daily news,” according to a survey conducted earlier this year by the Pew Research Center. However, 70% of respondents felt the volume of news was overwhelming and 50% said they looked to others to help them divine its significance.

This represents a golden opportunity, if you believe, as I do, that journalists not only possess valuable insights into the matters they cover but also have an absolute obligation to share their perspectives with the public after diligently gleaning all sides of a story in an ethical and open-minded manner.

For journalists to be able to report effectively on the news and its significance, we have to replace the intellectually indefensible pretense of objectivity with a more authentic standard that journalists actually can live up to.

The way to do that is to treat the public like adults by providing the clearest possible understanding of who is delivering news and commentary – and where they are coming from. Hence, the following proposal:

Let’s take advantage of the openness and inexhaustible space of the Internet to have every journalist publish a detailed statement of political, personal and financial interests at her home website and perhaps even in a well publicized national registry. Full disclosure would enable consumers to make their own informed judgments about the potential biases and believability of any journalist.

This standard will work as well for journalists and media outlets committed to down-the-middle reporting as those desiring to express a point of view.
A superb example of how detailed disclosure could work can be found at AllThingsD.Com, where co-editors Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg unsparingly bare their personal interests.

Swisher’s ethics statement covers everything from how she buys computers to how she manages her finances to her marriage to Megan Smith, a top Google executive. Mossberg readily admits that his disclosure “is more than most of you want to know” but adds, incisively:

“In the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.”

It’s time for everyone else to do likewise.

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