Objectivity in the Journalism Profession: The Perspective of Mass Media Sociologists
It has been seen how routines guarantee objectivity in a news story, and the criticisms that mass media sociologists make of the notion of objectivity as the form of the news have been examined. It is now worth looking at what the authors studied have to say about objectivity in general.
The first thing they assert is that objectivity is a requirement for the journalist: he requires it to lend credibility to his stories. They will also say that journalists rely on it to protect themselves. Schudson will undertake an historical review to examine how, throughout the history of their profession, journalists have relied on objectivity to legitimize their news stories.
The authors will also claim that journalistic objectivity is a reaction against skepticism, a news-making method and a mechanism of defense against attacks by the public and news sources.
All of the mass media sociologists recognize that, for journalists, objectivity is difficult to achieve. The second part of this chapter will therefore examine the difficulties that reporters face in building stories with objectivity: The problem of time pressures, the absence of training to remove personal opinion, the lack of distance from the public and the nature of the news enterprise itself are all mentioned.
The third part of the chapter will analyze objectivity as an ethical ideal. The challenges to realizing this ideal will lead the authors to announce that objectivity has been resolved through journalistic routines.
This part of the chapter will examine in detail Desantes’ thoughts on objectivity, particularly his view that objectivity is an attitude of the reporter and, therefore, an ethical ideal. Moreover, Desantes’ ideas offer a satisfactory response to the question of why objectivity is demanded of journalists and, even more importantly, a definition of objectivity itself. ← 157 | 158 → The mass media sociologists also see objectivity as a journalistic ideal when they argue that objectivity is based on the form of the news.
Epstein and Gans make the most significant contribution to the notion of objectivity as an ideal. Far removed from pragmatism, they adhere to realist Gnostic thinking. Epstein will say that embedded within objectivity is a decision of the journalist to reproduce reality as faithfully as possible, while Gans, for his part, will allude to the notions of intention, conscious effort and deliberate action in describing the journalist’s approach to reality.1
In general, however, when addressing objectivity as a journalistic ideal the authors confuse the term, equating objectivity with other like concepts: truth, impartiality, justice, equity, credibility and detachment.
In regard to truth we will follow the thinking of Desantes, as his work deals precisely with this relationship between truth and objectivity.
Lastly, there will be a review of the notion of detachment, which is particularly important to mass media sociologists as, through it, reporters are able to resolve the issue of their own values, ideology and professional autonomy and to defend themselves against possible attacks.
The Importance of Objectivity for Mass Media Sociologists
All of the authors view objectivity as an important and unavoidable issue in journalism. Primarily, they are concerned about the special, vital requirement that journalists be objective. They explain that both journalism theory and critics of newswork and journalists themselves accept objectivity as something that can be demanded from the media. The reasons for this vary, but all parties agree that objectivity, in journalism as in all other professions, is a type of consensus, procedure, formal attribute or mechanism that it confers security in professional practice. ← 158 | 159 →
Objectivity is also presented by the authors as a requirement for achieving credibility. Gans will say that, above all, objectivity fulfills a need to protect journalistic credibility. When reporters are not considered “objective”, the public can claim their stories are biased and thus discredit the news. Ultimately, Gans admits that objectivity also has a commercial rationale. In fact, he says that the Associated Press is often credited with having invented objectivity in order to sell uniform wire-service news to a politically and otherwise diverse set of local newspapers.
Even more precisely, however, the authors coincide in viewing objectivity as one of the factors that legitimizes a profession.
Mass media sociologists are mainly interested in discovering why objectivity legitimizes journalism. But underlying the arguments of these authors in this first part of the chapter is a major weakness: They never ask what objectivity is, or why objectivity can legitimize a profession; they do not even ask what characteristic of objectivity per se allows it to legitimize a profession. They only refer to why objectivity is needed in the profession.
Schudson’s historical approach, which will be examined in this section, is of particular interest because it attempts to differentiate journalism from other professions. He explains the relationship of the people with the concept of objectivity through his description of a series of milestones in US history.
In Schudson’s work, objectivity assumes its legitimizing quality because of its relationship to two other concepts: knowledge and authority. The author believes that objectivity is the dominant ideal that legitimizes knowledge and authority in all contemporary professions. In this regard, there seems to be no difference between journalism and other professions.
Schudson will say that the sciences originally put forward objectivity as an ideal that legitimizes a profession. Nevertheless, he is unsatisfied with the way in which scientists address the discussion of objectivity. The idea that proposes objectivity as an ideal will basically be used both to embellish the profession and to unmask it. And he critiques this dual point of view because it leads to two opposing stances, which he calls “discrediting” and “adulating”.
The first denounces an assumed objectivity, arguing that it is simply an attempt to legitimize power by using technical language to define political ← 159 | 160 → issues. The second –“adulating” – identifies objectivity in any profession with “science”, which is understood as the path that is right and true, and the one that leads to knowledge.
What are the characteristics of science that legitimize a piece of knowledge? Why is science the best pathway to knowledge? Schudson finds no satisfactory answer to this question, which leads him to assert that, conceived thus, a science generally understood as opposed to ideology, threatens to become ideology itself.
Schudson’s is not interested in discussing the characteristics of science or objectivity that legitimize knowledge and bring one closer to the truth; rather, he asks why these two concepts, science and objectivity, actually legitimize knowledge. More important than the internal development of science as an institution or a body of knowledge and practices, he will say, are the reasons why the idea of science and the ideal of objectivity are so accentuated in our culture.
Schudson introduces the idea of science in western culture. With a certain degree of irony, he asks how our XX-century western culture, with its wisdom in understanding science today, can bring us any closer to the truth than former systems of knowledge, and that is a question that glorifications of science and objectivity do not answer.
Gitlin also introduces the concept of legitimacy and relates it to objectivity. The media claim and earn their legitimacy, in part, through the acceptance of trustworthy routines of objectivity. He asserts that journalists’ way of resolving the issue of objectivity can bring the legitimacy of the social system into conflict with the legitimacy of the medium. Objectivity as a routine can occasionally allow the entry of social movements that challenge the dominant ideology. Because of this, he says, television’s right to legitimacy, embodied in the professional ideology of objectivity, requires it … to take a certain risk of undermining the legitimacy of the social system as a whole.
The way in which opposing social movements are introduced into society refers to the principle of objectivity as a way of neutralizing non-official versions.
As a doorway to examining the authors’ reasons for granting such importance to objectivity as a “legitimizer” of the profession, it is a good ← 160 | 161 → idea first to review Schudson’s history of objectivity in journalism, then discuss the ideas that emerge in that exercise. This is important because it shows how at different historical periods different views of objectivity have been used to legitimize the profession.
The History of Journalistic Objectivity in the United States
The author that focuses most closely on this issue, as we have seen, is Schudson himself. He does this through an historical review that begins in the early days of the profession. For the author, the first time that objectivity appears in this context is around 1830; since then, he says, the topic has arisen again and again because of regular charges that North American journalism lacks objectivity.
The subject assumes special interest when one learns that, before the 1830s, objectivity was not an issue. American newspapers were expected to present a partisan viewpoint, not a neutral one. Schudson relates objectivity, in journalism as well as in all other professions, to the emergence of democracy and the market economy.
He argues that the concept of objectivity was born together with the concept of news; the first emergence of the idea of objective news, news not slanted toward a particular political party, was in the Jacksonian era. Schudson links this development to the rise of democracy and the market economy. Before that time, newspapers were not expected to relate “the news” of the day. For Schudson, examining the transformation of the press in the Jacksonian era is crucial for an understanding of the notion of objectivity in journalism. The relationship between “the news” and the democratization of politics was established during that era, in which the market economy expanded and the authority of the urban entrepreneurial middle class increased.
Objectivity in the press reached its zenith with the appearance of the Associated Press (AP), which sold objective news. For Schudson, it seems obvious why the idea of news, once established, should turn into ← 161 | 162 → “non-partisan writing”, in other words, strictly objective news. The AP could only sell its news to newspapers of different political stripes if the reporting of the news was sufficiently objective to be acceptable to all potential clients. Thus, Schudson establishes a close link between objectivity and the appearance of the first American wire news service, the Associated Press itself. Following Schudson’s analysis, then, the notion of objectivity originated from economic motives.
At the end of the century there was a shift in the concept of objectivity in newspapers. A second notion of objectivity emerges, related to telling a “good story”. This new idea of objectivity coexists with the first, which emphasized the acquisition of facts.
Reporters were able to produce both “literary” news and factual news, Schudson says, and this gave rise to different forms of sensationalism in the news. In Schudson’s opinion, where the Associated Press was factual to appeal to a politically diverse clientele, the Times was informational to attract a relatively select, socially homogeneous readership of the well to do.
Schudson will say that before World War I, reporters were interested in facts; he calls them naïve empiricists. Expressed in another way, Schudson explains that the war ended people’s belief in an objective reality external to their personal reality. Writing of the way in which people come to know things, Schudson introduces the idea that “human beings are cultural animals who know and see and hear the world through socially constructed filters”, adding that from the 1920s on, the idea that human beings individually and collectively construct the reality they deal with has held a central position in social thought.
Schudson believes that the existence of reality outside of man arose from a circumstantial issue: social and economic stability. He will say that, before the 1920s, journalists did not think much about the subjectivity of perception. They had relatively little incentive to doubt the firmness of the “reality” by which they lived.
The consequences of World War I, in Schudson’s view, did not fail to affect journalists, who, like many others, lost faith in verities a democratic market society had taken for granted. Reporters’ familiarity with the effects of propaganda and public relations during the war persuaded them that ← 162 | 163 → the world they reported was one that interested parties had constructed for them to report. In such a world, naïve empiricism could not last.
World War I, with its powerful propaganda machines, opened the eyes of journalists, who began to conceive of the possibility that news can be managed by different interest groups. Thus, for the journalist, the isolated fact was no longer reliable. Schudson states that, in the twenties and thirties, many journalists observed with growing anxiety that facts themselves, or what they had taken to be facts, could not be trusted. One response to this discomfiting view was the institutionalization in the daily paper of new genres of subjective reporting, like the political column. Another response turned the journalists’ anxiety on its head and encouraged journalists to replace a simple faith in facts with an allegiance to rules and procedures created for a world in which even facts were in question.
Ultimately, Schudson will say that propaganda and public relations undermined the old faith in facts.
In arriving at this assertion Schudson relies on Lippmann, who describes this reality in detail. Lippmann maintains that the emergence of the publicity agent is one sign that the facts of modern life do not spontaneously take on a form that makes them recognizable. Someone must give them that form, and since reporters in their daily routine cannot give form to the facts, interested parties welcome a solution to this situation.
Not all reporters can potentially be columnists, nor are they free to write their own interpretations, Schudson says; reporters need to believe in the value of their work of gathering and presenting the facts, but they also require a framework to ensure they can take their trade seriously and persuade readers and critics alike that their work is worthwhile. This is what the notion of “objectivity”, as it was elaborated in the twenties and thirties, tried to provide. The result of this is that by the mid-thirties, the term objectivity, unknown in journalism before World War I, appears to have been common parlance.
The term “objectivity” was introduced in debates among the staff of the Times and Fortune in the 1930s. It also made a notable appearance before the US Supreme Court in 1937. Morris Ernst represented the American Newspaper Guild in the case of the Associated Press versus the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which claimed that the AP had fired a reporter ← 163 | 164 → for his loyalty to the Newspaper Guild. The AP itself claimed that the reporter had been fired for writing biased pro-labor stories. The court ruled that the Constitution does not guarantee objectivity of the press, nor is objectivity obtainable in a subjective world. Ultimately, the NLRB was to state that the question … really raised is not whether news shall be unprejudiced but rather whose prejudices shall color the news.
Schudson also analyzes the issue of objectivity in relation to the Newspaper Guild. The Guild had been organized in 1933 as a union for the editorial personnel on newspapers and other publications. When, in 1937, the Guild endorsed a series of political resolutions, it encountered substantial dissent in its own membership … But it was the existence of the Guild as a militant union, not its political stands, which impelled publishers to oppose it and to use the cry of objectivity as a weapon.
The American Newspaper Publishers Association and the American Society of Newspapers Editors met in 1937 with the union to discuss objectivity as a journalistic and public principle, and not as an economic matter. According to Schudson, their main motivation clearly seemed to be to frustrate the union’s power: this vital service of the press (to present the news “uncolored”) to the public can be performed properly only when those who are responsible for the publication are free to choose the persons whom they deem best qualified to report and edit the news.
By the 1960s, both critics of the press and defenders took objectivity to be the emblem of American journalism, an improvement over a past of “sensationalism” and a contrast to the party papers of Europe.
Here Schudson’s initial question reemerges: Why does objectivity legitimize professions, including journalism? Schudson reports: “Whether regarded as the fatal flaw or the supreme virtue of the American press, all agreed that the idea of objectivity was at the heart of what journalism has meant in this country”.2 This passion for objectivity in the 1960s, Schudson will say, prompted more intense discussions of the ideal of objectivity in journalism than ever before, with sources and news consumers fueling the debate. ← 164 | 165 →
The Ideas Underlying the History of Objectivity
Though of interest in itself, Schudson’s passage through the history of journalism in the United States is especially important for the ideas that this historical review uncovers.
The inexplicable motives behind the demand for objectivity in journalism
Schudson explains that, although not all journalists think that they should be objective in their work, the belief in objectivity is so widespread that all must deal with this requirement to some degree. The question posed by Schudson is: “But why? What kind of world is ours and what kind of institution is journalism that they sustain this particular ideal, objectivity? … I shall not ask here the familiar question: are newspapers objective? I shall ask, instead, why the question is so familiar?”3
Schudson offers various explanations. Firstly, he refers to plausible argument offered by the history of the press: objectivity began with the AP. At first glance, however, the author feels that there is little proof of this and gives two good reasons to doubt this assertion.
Schudson asks: “Why should a practice, obviously important to the survival of the institution of the wire service, become a guiding ideal in institutions not subject to the same constraints?” It would make more sense to think that the newspapers adopted the AP style as a model for their journalists regardless of their affinities, interests or needs. But this assertion, explains Schudson, brings with it a second, more serious problem: “Objective reporting did not become the chief norm or practice in journalism in the late nineteenth century when the Associated Press was growing”.
In saying this, Schudson affirms, he is not adhering to the view that journalism is therefore inferior to other professions. He simply wishes to identify the problem of objectivity in journalism. He asks, “How is it that ← 165 | 166 → in an occupation without the social organization of self-regulated authority there is still passionate controversy about objectivity?” But he discards as unacceptable one possible answer: That the less a profession is seen to be self-evidently objective, the more passionate the controversy will be.
Schudson mentions that, while there seem to be weighty reasons for abandoning the quest for objectivity in journalism, there do not seem to be adequate reasons for demanding it. He asks: “Why, in journalism, where none of the features that guarantee objectivity in law or medicine exist or are likely to exist, should objectivity still be a serious issue? Why hasn’t it been given up altogether?”
Up to now in his arguments, Schudson has considered the views of theorists. He now adds that, in practice, objectivity seems very hard for journalists to achieve. Their discouragement about ever attaining objectivity, Schudson has already explained, began after World War I. Government management of the news, which began to concern journalists after World War I, became an increasingly disturbing problem with the rise of a national security establishment and an “imperial” presidency after World War II. For Schudson, the ideal of objectivity has by no means been displaced, but, more than ever, it holds its authority on sufferance.
Objectivity as “emotional impulse”
Schudson is also influenced by Lippmann’s theory that objectivity is an emotional impulse. Lippmann explains this emotional impulse in the search for objectivity by saying that, as our minds become more deeply aware of their own subjectivism, we find a zest in objective method that is not otherwise there.
Lippman’s argument can be judged from two perspectives. It can be discarded for being irrational, but it can also be taken seriously, if we take Schudson’s concept of objectivity as describing an emotional impulse. According to Schudson, Lippmann had great expectations for the professionalization of journalism already in 1919. For Lippmann, objectivity represented security, this rationale to which we alluded previously, as something outside of ourselves that proves our own subjectivity. ← 166 | 167 →
Schudson identifies an awareness of a commitment to objectivity, not only among theorists like Lippmann, but also among reporters. He will say that the reporters of the 1890s hardly doubted that they were able to write with realism. Around the 1930s there was a shift, as we saw, but Schudson asserts that even then they viewed objectivity as an ideal: Even journalists committed to objectivity acknowledged that objective reporting was ultimately a goal beyond reach – the perils of subjectivity were well recognized.
To back up his assertion that journalists are concerned about objectivity, Schudson relies on surveys that Rosten conducted with a group of reporters. He states that both Rosten’s question and the response are of interest. The question indicates that objectivity was understood as an ideal counter to the reality of the reporter’s own subjectivity, although here that subjectivity is taken to be most influenced by editorial suggestion, not personal predisposition. The response is evidence that, at least among the journalistic elite of Washington correspondents, there was great skepticism that the ideal of objectivity was, or perhaps even could be, realized …
In Schudson’s view, Rosten’s survey offers a somewhat satisfactory, though for us still insufficient, response to the demand for objectivity in journalism. He argues that both journalists and theorists recognize that they should be objective in news stories. He calls the AP argument implausible, for apparently good reason, leaning instead towards Lippmann’s idea of the emotional impulse.
Schudson’s response would appear to be subjective, as it is journalists themselves who need the requirement of journalistic objectivity. The response makes no reference to any characteristic of objectivity, but Schudson will say that journalists believed firmly in it because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift.
Gitlin will offer a similar response, stating that generations of journalists have aspired to the value of objectivity, have even held it as an heirloom. He also undertakes a brief historical survey that reveals, in the author’s opinion, that objectivity is difficult to achieve. He writes “The professional insistence that objective journalism is desirable, and that objective determinations of newsworthiness are possible, arose during the nineteenth century, albeit fitfully, as part of the sweeping intellectual movement toward ← 167 | 168 → scientific detachment and the culturewide separation of fact from value”. This idea will be returned to later on, but here Gitlin continues: “From time to time, as in the sixties, the value of objectivity gets questioned; it always returns, virtually by default. ‘Opinion’ will be reserved to editorials, ‘news’ to the news columns”.
Not only theorists and journalists participate in this discussion; critics of journalism also use the premise of objectivity in their attacks on the profession. Schudson asks why critics take for granted that the press should be objective. He argues that in the thirties, critics who had attacked objectivity favored interpretive reporting as a way of maintaining professional standing in a world which had outgrown the blunt approach of “just getting the facts”.
In the 1960s, critics began to suspect the goal of professionalism, and objectivity in journalism was not spared; “regarded as an antidote to bias, [it] came to be looked upon as the most insidious bias of all”.4
The central criticism, and one that the mass media sociologists agreed with, is that objective reporting reproduce[s] a vision of social reality which refused to examine the basic structures of power and privilege. Critics in general, would say that objectivity produced not only incomplete journalism, but even warped journalism. It represented collusion with institutions whose legitimacy was in dispute. And there was an intense moral urgency in this view.
Reaction against skepticism and passion for facts
A third idea that can be deduced from Schudson’s historical review is that of objectivity as a reaction against skepticism. Although the author himself is skeptical of the relation between reality and objectivity, he explains that, while in the beginning objectivity was grounded in the facts, it soon began to be grounded in consensus. ← 168 | 169 →
Without even being aware of it himself, Schudson advances towards a definition of objectivity as the “legitimatizer” of journalism. Schudson will say that passion for objectivity is a consequence of passion for the facts. Man seems to obtain security from what exists –the facts– as these tell him what he is. Schudson relates passion for objectivity with the rise of democracy and the market economy. In democracy, people (and not necessarily the “best people”) govern, and one vote is as good as another. Something similar occurs in a market economy: In the market, things did not contain value in themselves; value was an arithmetic outcome of a collection of suppliers and demanders seeking their own interests. Both democracy and the market give value to facts, which acquire value precisely because they are facts.
Schudson explains that in an urban and mobile society, a sense of community or of the public had no transcendent significance and, indeed, one responded to other people as objects, rather than as kindred … and trusted to impersonal processes and institutions – advertising, department stores, formal schooling, hospitals, mass-produced goods, at-large elections – rather than rely on personal relations. All of this focused attention on facts. These facts, says Schudson, belonged to a reality outside of man.
The link that Schudson makes between objectivity and the rise of democracy and the market is particularly important in our attempt to discover why the need for objectivity exists. By highlighting the importance of facts grounded in reality, he introduces the intimate relationship between reality and objectivity. But to truly understand this relation, we will see below, we must rely on other authors and another kind of argument.
It was not until after World War I that the value of a democratic, market-based society was questioned, by its own logic. Along with journalism, the social sciences rudely experienced the skepticism that democracy and the market themselves had proposed. His experience of propaganda during World War I led Schudson to critique the notion of objectivity grounded in facts.
After the war, there arose the ideal of objectivity as consensually validated statements about the world, predicated on a radical separation of facts and values. ← 169 | 170 →
It is worth stopping to consider Schudson’s definition of objectivity as “consensually validated statements about the world”. Once again, he offers an historical explanation for the disappearance of the connection between objectivity and facts: between objectivity and reality.
Thus, objectivity understood as consensus, is related to agreement, consent. For Schudson, the grounds for objectivity have changed; from relying on the facts of an external reality – facts and numbers – it becomes grounded in agreements among people, agreements that ultimately are not necessarily founded upon reality.
Thus Schudson criticizes the relation between objectivity and reality, labeling it pejoratively, naive empiricism. With this connection broken, man continues to feel the need to stand on firm ground and regard the objective as something outside of himself. For Schudson, this terra firma can now be found in a view of objectivity as consensus. It does not seem to matter that this consensus is related to facts based in reality, but only that there is a consensus that gives man some sense of security.
For Schudson, the idea of building a foundation upon consensually validated statements does not arise merely as an extrapolation of naive empiricism or a belief in the facts, but as a reaction against skepticism. It is not that people do not “want” the facts, it is just that they do not trust them. This lack of confidence becomes the point of departure.
The interesting thing about this historical study of Schudson’s is that it looks at a series of ideas that are related to objectivity. The step from reality – the facts – to skepticism is not a straight-line extrapolation but a dialectical response to the culture of a democratic market society. Objectivity will be transformed into consensus, which, more than the final expression of a belief in facts, is the assertion of a method designed for a world in which even facts could not be trusted.
Objectivity as the affirmation of a method
We have accompanied Schudson on a leap from objectivity grounded in the facts to objectivity as a consensus, as a designed method, in other words, as a routine. ← 170 | 171 →
Tuchman also refers to objectivity as consensus and as method. Following sociology, her argument begins with objectivity as legitimating of the profession. She quotes Gouldner and C. Wright Mills and their expression “transpersonal replicability” to suggest that objectivity simply means that the sociologist describes his procedures as explicitly as others, and in using those same procedures, reaches the same conclusions. To Tuchman this also seems to be the journalist’s notion of objectivity: a technical routinization that is based ultimately in the codification of the research procedures that were employed.
Tuchman, in a similar though more efficient manner than Schudson, reaches the conclusion that professionals have resolved the issue of objectivity. For the author, this is at most … an operational definition of objectivity which presumably tells us what we must do in order to justify an assertion that some particular finding is objective. That Tuchman would make this assertion in the first few pages of her essay does not seem strange, given that the central focus of her work is objectivity understood as the strategic ritual of journalists.
Without defining objectivity, Tuchman will say that objectivity as technical routinization does not tell us very much about what objectivity means conceptually and connotatively. Both sociologists and journalists, she explains, elude epistemological problems by “hiding behind formal techniques”. And she also proposes that sociological objectivity is a strategic ritual. For Tuchman, journalists legitimize objectivity by calling it a ritual that enables them to deal with any attacks they might suffer.
Tuchman agrees with Schudson on this point. For both authors, journalists legitimize objectivity by saying that it is a technique, a consensus, a designed method, in Schudson’s words, or a routine, in Tuchman’s terms.
To this list of associative terms, Tuchman adds the idea of objectivity as procedure when she states: Other professions and occupations equate objectivity with the ability to remain sufficiently impersonal to follow routine procedures appropriate to a specific case. She also offers additional terms related to objectivity: behavioral capacity, impersonality, procedure, which we can equate with the terms technique, consensus and designed method used by Schudson. ← 171 | 172 →
Both Schudson and Tuchman explain that objectivity as a method or routine legitimizes the profession of journalism. Their express intention, however, is not to describe the individual concepts that forge the relation between objectivity and legitimacy, but simply to draw attention to the relationship itself.
Objectivity as a defense mechanism
Schudson’s historical review also shows how objectivity is a mechanism of defense for journalists against attacks by the public, sources and editors, and this idea is reiterated among the other authors. Mass media sociologists offer this as one more reason why journalists demand objectivity in their profession.
Tuchman explains that sociologists’ and journalists’ insistence upon objectivity is not peculiar to [their] profession. Doctors and lawyers declare objectivity to be the appropriate stance towards clients. To journalists … the term objectivity stands as a bulwark between themselves and critics. When they are attacked for a contentious presentation of the facts, newspaper men invoke their objectivity almost the way a Mediterranean peasant might wear a clove of garlic around his neck to ward off evil spirits.
For Tuchman, objectivity can be found in routine procedures that are exemplified as formal attributes: the use of quotation marks, degrees of importance, legal precedents, X-rays, which protect the professional from mistakes and from critics. As we saw above, she arrives at the conclusion that the word “objectivity” is being used defensively as a strategic ritual.
Tuchman is the first to propose the theory of routines as a method of defense used by journalists to deal with attacks and criticism from the public, and the other authors discussed here also pick up on the idea. For Tuchman, routines are “performance strategies”, as journalists invoke ritualistic procedures in order to deflect potential criticism and to follow routines bounded by the cognitive limits of rationality. For her, the word denotes tactics used offensively to anticipate attack or defensively to deflect criticism after the work is produced. ← 172 | 173 →
After reading Tuchman, Shoemaker and Reese respond that, because newsworkers have little time to reflect on whether they have gotten at the truth in their stories, they need a set of procedures, or strategies, that if followed will protect them from occupational hazards such as libel suits and reprimands from superiors. Journalists often defend themselves from such attacks by making use of the routine of objectivity.
Tuchman mentions the difficulties journalists may encounter if their work is not considered “objective”. The reporters that she observed believe that by calling their work “objective” they can deal with constant pressure from such things as deadlines, potential lawsuits and reprimands from their superiors. Journalists face these pressures by emphasizing their “objectivity”; threats can be minimized, they argue, if they follow strategies that produce “objective news”.
According to Tuchman, journalists assume that if they gather and structure the “facts” in a detached, balanced and impersonal way, deadlines can be met and they can avoid lawsuits for libel. The journalists in Tuchman’s study believe that most people understand the importance of deadlines and the dangers of libel suits, even if only because of Hollywood stereotypes of the reporting profession.
Recounting their personal experience with libel suits, the journalists in Tuchman’s study admitted that while they had behaved objectively, they had committed unavoidable mistakes. In brief, they explained that the journalist has to judge the facts by going to sources, but some facts must simply be accepted as “true”. If everything had to be questioned, we would arrive at absurdities such as the following example they gave Tuchman: “Robert Jones and his so-called wife Fay Smith yesterday evening held what could be called a party in their supposed home in honor of a woman who says her name is Longina Berrueco Sonseca, and who is commonly referred to as the aunt of the aforementioned woman who, according to testimony, is the lady of the house”.
Objectivity as routine, conclude Shoemaker and Reese, has a technical character. It is not presented by mass media sociologists as a moral attitude that journalists must adopt in their search for an honest account that is faithful to the truth. Shoemaker and Reese illustrate this using the case of Senator Joe McCarthy, who made many unfounded accusations during the ← 173 | 174 → anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s. These accusations were reported by the press, duly attributed, but contained falsehoods that few reporters believed. Although these reporters were angry at being obliged to report McCarthy’s untruths, they did not abandon the resilient objective routine, and reporting patterns remained intact.
In effect, though mass media sociologists do not state it explicitly, we can infer that by using procedures that guarantee objectivity, journalists can respond effectively to the public’s right to be informed and avoid communicating the doubtful, what is not proven; what could be happening, what could have been said.
In regard to objectivity used as a defense method, Gans says that journalists seek to exclude conscious values and they do so in three ways: through objectivity, the disregard of implications, and the rejection of ideology (as they define it). In this sense, Gans examines the most practical aspect of objectivity and its use as armor against attacks. He says that the exclusion of values is not solely a goal but also a practical consideration, for it defends journalists against actual or possible criticism, and protects them against demands by powerful critics for censorship and self-censorship.
Tuchman argues that most journalists fully realize that objective methods provide no guidelines for the selection either of stories or of which facts go into stories. Nevertheless, in making the selection, journalists strive to be objective, both in intent, by applying personal detachment; and in effect, by disregarding the implications of the news. They do not choose the news on the basis of whom it will help or hurt; and when they cannot ignore implications, they try to be fair.
Referring to objectivity as a means of defense, Gans mentions that journalists demand freedom from the consequences that the news can generate to protect themselves from excessive criticism, because this makes irrelevant the objections of those who see themselves disadvantaged by the news. Gans adds that, as a result, freedom from implications almost becomes an imperative for story selection and production. Story selectors are exempt from the responsibility of worrying whom their choices will help or hurt; and reporters are able to gain access to sources for whom the news might have negative effects, and to ask them any and all questions they regard as newsworthy. ← 174 | 175 →
Above all, the right to ignore implications eliminates the possibility of paralyzing uncertainty. Gans turns to routinized objectivity in response to the pressure that journalists are subject to, explaining that, if journalists had to assess the implications of the stories or facts they choose, and had to determine, much less anticipate, the not immediately obvious implications, they would be incapable of making news judgments – at least, not in the times they meet their deadlines.
The arguments can be summarized in Shoemaker and Reese’s comments on the routine of objectivity. These authors say that, while news values help the gatekeepers to select content according to their interest, other procedures help them to avoid offending the audience. The procedure of objectivity is a prime example, and it has an observable defensive function. They add that objectivity, notwithstanding the fact that it is a cornerstone of journalism, is rooted in the practical requirements of an organization. In this regard, objectivity is less than a fundamental creed of journalists; it is a series of procedures to which they gladly accommodate themselves in order to protect themselves from attack. And their editors are equally concerned with jeopardizing their own positions. To summarize the mass media sociologists, objectivity is a defense routine that editors and reporters employ to avoid attracting public censure and discrediting the medium in which they work. In other words, objectivity allows newsworkers to “win over” the audience and enhance the journalistic prestige of the news organization.
Related to the idea of defending oneself against attacks is the argument that objectivity is also used as a means of acquiring power. Referring to Thomas Mann, Schudson explains that objectivity as an ideal has been used and is still used, even disingenuously, as a camouflage for power. But its source lies deeper, in a need to cover over neither authority nor privilege, but the disappointment in the modern gaze.
The idea of objectivity as a way of camouflaging power is an idea that the authors mentioned frequently. The idea is based on the conclusions of their empirical studies regarding how people in positions of power use routines – and in particular the routine of objectivity – to maintain the dominant social order. ← 175 | 176 →
Gitlin also refers to idea of power when he asserts that objectivity is a reporter’s means of defense against pressure: reporters use objectivity because it works for them. In this way they appease those who exert the pressure, the public and their own consciences. Gitlin states that the aspiration does have the effect of insulating reporters greatly, though far from perfectly, from the direct political pressures of specific advertisers, politicians, and interest groups, and even, in the more prestigious news institutions, from the prerogatives of interfering publishers.
The idea of objectivity as power refers to the notion of objectivity as a means of defense that journalists use against attacks and accusations from the public and their sources.
By reviewing the thread of objectivity in the history of journalism in the United States, we have drawn out the different notions of objectivity offered by mass media sociologists. Among others, objectivity has been viewed as a demand made of journalists, as a way of legitimizing the profession, as a passion for facts, as a consensually validated method and as a means of defense against attacks or to win power from sources and audiences.
While the theorists know clearly that journalists make use of objectivity when writing their stories, they are also aware that these professionals face a series of barriers to achieving such objectivity.
Barriers to Putting Objectivity into Practice
The authors identify a series of barriers to the practice of objectivity. The first they call attention to is the lack of time reporters have to produce a news story. They add to this journalists’ difficulty in detaching themselves from their own values when they decide to investigate an issue. The third barrier is the lack of insulation from the public: journalists are exposed to criticism from those who read or listen to them. The final barrier journalist’s face is related to the company in which they work. For example, the business interests of the company do not always match the wishes of the editorial staff that produce the news, which reduces reporters’ autonomy. ← 176 | 177 → In addition, the editor who edits the reporter’s work is not always familiar with the topic and often wants to change some of the information. The media policy can also hinder a reporter’s professional freedom.
In Schudson’s view, we cannot demand objectivity in journalism as we do in other professions that have a professional apparatus guaranteeing it. He states that objectivity is a peculiar demand to make of institutions which, as business corporations, are dedicated first of all to economic survival; it is a peculiar demand to make of institutions which often, by tradition or explicit credo, are political organs; it is a peculiar demand to make of editors and reporters who have none of the professional apparatus which, for doctors or lawyers or scientists, is supposed to guarantee objectivity.
Lack of time
It is therefore worth examining what the authors say about the difference between demanding objectivity from journalists and demanding it from those in other professions. The first difference they point out is time.
Tuchman compares journalists’ work with that of sociologists. He says that, unlike sociologists, journalists have a limited repertory in which to define and defend their objectivity. While the sociologist is a “thinker”, the journalist is a “man of action”. In other words, the sociologist can devote himself to epistemological analysis and reflection, but the journalist cannot. The reporter, explains Tuchman, must make decisions immediately regarding the validity, believability and “truth” of an issue if he is to overcome the problems imposed by the nature of his work: processing information that we call news, a replaceable consumer product that is produced daily. The processing of the news leaves no time for epistemological analysis and reflection.
Tuchman justifies the need for objectivity by saying that the newsmen need some working notion of objectivity to minimize the risks imposed by deadlines, libel suits, and superiors’ reprimands. Unless a reporter has drawn an extended investigatory assignment, he generally has less than one working day to familiarize himself with a story’s background, to gather information, and to write his assignment. ← 177 | 178 →
Lack of training in detachment
In other professions, adds Schudson, the client is defined by institutional mechanisms. In non-journalistic professions, two mechanisms of social control are assumed to secure objectivity: higher education and training (practice). Education provides novices with scientific knowledge and an objective attitude that helps them to separate their personal preferences and passions. In journalism, says Schudson, it is very difficult to achieve this objective. We will examine the journalist’s task of separating out personal values further below.
Gitlin, marked by his concern that objectivity is used by journalists to keep dominant power groups in power, refers to the limited, specific nature of journalism training, stating that journalists are trained in certain areas only. This destroys their sensitivity to the voices of the working class and minority groups. The author adds that they are also trained to identify and treat “the news” in a way that makes them “credible” and in their own opinion, “important”. Credibility, importance, objectivity – these elusive categories are neither arbitrary nor fixed.
The issue of training exposes another problem for the journalist–professional autonomy. We will examine this topic also in more detail below. Gitlin believes that reporters can be flexible enough to adapt to the expectations and experiences of their editors, newspaper owners and sources while also being sufficiency determined to justify their demands for status and professional standards. To illustrate this point, Gans quotes a top TV producer: “They can order me to do something on big or small issues, for after all, this is a company and business, but they rarely exert that influence. I am as autonomous as I could expect to be. I stress the final sentence”.5
For Gitlin, autonomy appears to be limited. For example, when journalists attempt to perform their work in a professional manner, they systematically frame the news to make it compatible with society’s institutional apparatus. He alludes once again to this notion of frame, explaining that this technique enables journalists to sustain the dominant frame through ← 178 | 179 → the banal, everyday momentum of their routines. Their autonomy keeps within the boundaries of the hegemonic system. Gitlin introduces a topic that is often addressed by mass media sociologists and which was referred to in Chapter 2: how journalistic routines are used by sources to get a message across through the news.
Objectivity in the professions is guaranteed, then, by the autonomy of professional groups – the collective independence of professions from the market and from popular will, and the personal independence of professionals, assured by their training, from their own values. As the authors would say, neither attribute is applicable to journalism.
Lack of insulation from the public
The second basic form of social control in attaining objectivity that Schudson identifies is insulation from the public. The most common method is through the use of technical language or jargon.
The difference between journalism and other professions seems clear to Schudson in this regard. In this context, he says, the notion of objectivity in journalism seems anomalous. Nothing in the journalist’s education gives him license to give form to the opinions of others about the world. Neither do journalists have esoteric techniques or their own language. The central issue is that newspapers are directly dependent on market forces. They appeal directly to popular opinion; in this regard, journalism seems to be a non-insulated profession.
The authors find it difficult to define how we can demand objectivity of a profession that has the mission of disseminating knowledge to a public that is not capable of understanding all or part of what happens in the world in which it lives. By definition, journalism is not a profession operating in isolation: it operates by thinking about the public and is subject to the public’s demands.
The public, or audience, of a journalist is not the public of a doctor or an attorney. The doctor learns a discipline that his patient does not know and this is why the patient goes to the doctor. The doctor–patient relationship is bilateral. In contrast, the relationship between the journalist ← 179 | 180 → and the people surrounding him is multifaceted. On the one hand, the audience demands that the journalist have knowledge, though they may not agree with it, and on the other, the journalist’s sources want their ideas communicated to the public using journalists as intermediaries; finally, the journalist is embedded in an organization that has its own aims, which do not always coincide with his values.
Thus, with good reason Schudson states that to criticize a lawyer, we say, “I’m not a lawyer, but …” and to question a doctor, we say, “I’m not an expert on medicine, but …” We feel no such compunction to qualify criticism of the morning paper or the television news.
Barriers Related to the News Organization
Another kind of barrier journalists face to attaining objectivity is related to the nature of the news organization and the people working therein. We will begin by examining the difficulties that are closest to the journalist and work our way outwards.
Professional autonomy
We will delve here into the idea of autonomy in journalism, to which the authors make reference, to discuss the journalist’s independence in practicing his profession. Autonomy is intimately related to objectivity, as the latter cannot exist in journalism without the former.
The topic of professional autonomy, like the subject of detachment, necessarily has to do with the company or organization. A good introduction to the topic of news organizations is provided by Epstein. The simplicity of his argument allows him to integrate into the discussion an assertion that all of the authors acknowledge, which is that the organization, at all levels we will examine below, influences journalistic work. Epstein is the ← 180 | 181 → first of the mass media sociologists to cover this topic, and all of the others refer to him in their discussions of it.
There are a series of decisions that are made at different organizational levels that restrict the journalist’s complete autonomy and, explains Epstein, news executives cannot be unaware of this situation. Epstein bases his statement on the decision-making that occurs in each editorial department. He recognizes that network news does not automatically report the news, but that it offers the result of an organizational decision-making process. Given this situation, he says, network executives cannot deny that the images on the news are a product of the organization. Only if this were not true would it be possible to refer to journalists as “autonomous professionals”.
If they are autonomous, argues Epstein, then they make their decisions about news stories independent of the needs, expectations and hierarchy of the organization for which they work … If newsmen, as autonomous professionals, were indeed independent of the organization which employs them, and could select and edit news according to a set of professional norms, then an examination of the decision-making process … would be no more than an exercise in clarifying professional norms.
In practice, Epstein has shown that many people intervene in the production of a single news item, and therefore it is impossible to achieve professional autonomy.
In theory, journalists’ detachment from their personal values will give them a certain professional autonomy in their work. But this autonomy can be diluted by the different decisions that are made within the news organization. Epstein explains that detachment makes sense in a news organization if the journalist remains an outsider. However, even in that case, if the journalist remains an outsider, there are many other instances where staff handling the news are not outsiders. Thus, the effort that journalists will make to detach themselves from their values and opinions will be, in Epstein’s opinion, somewhat useless.
For this reason he affirms that television journalists are “professionals” in a very different sense than are doctors or scientists. In Epstein’s interview with Reuven Frank, a journalist who participated in his study, the author pinpoints the key to professional journalism: Frank describes the journalist as an outsider. Seen from this perspective, news is change as seen by an ← 181 | 182 → outsider (the correspondent) on behalf of other outsiders (the audience). Epstein describes the journalist not as an expert in a certain field, or “an insider”; on the contrary, he thinks that journalists are expected to be “universal” (although there are exceptions to this rule, such as specialist writers of space exploration and science, for example).
To ensure detachment, news networks adopted the custom of rotating their correspondents from news to news, and area to area, under the assumption that an “outsider” would perceive and report the story in a way that is more comprehensible to a non-expert audience, than a journalist “insider”.
In any case, states Epstein, the distancing of the journalist does not offer a solution to the issue of professional autonomy, and the journalist’s lack of any exclusive knowledge of the issues also tends to diminish his right to autonomy in decision-making. If the producer or supervising executive can be assumed to know as much about the subject as the reporter, his judgment on how the story is to be edited and presented cannot be easily disregarded.
Epstein quotes Talcott Parsons, who has observed that only members of a profession are qualified to interpret the traditions of that profession with authority. To Epstein it seems that in the case of journalism this type of analysis will always be unfruitful, and he poses the following question: Are journalists working for television networks in a similar situation as doctors and scientists, who can act independently of the organization for which they work? Epstein answers that doctors and scientists are granted a significant degree of freedom, if not complete autonomy, to make the decisions about their specialty, as it is assumed that they have a virtual monopoly over their field of knowledge.
He explains that this monopoly is credible because of the assumption that members of the profession have passed a closely controlled program of formal education in the field in question and they have passed exams and been certified as competent in their technical knowledge by the qualifications of their respective professional associations. He offers the example of a laboratory administrator, who cannot legitimately question the decisions a microbiologist makes about how to conduct his experiments if it is assumed that only another microbiologist has the necessary competence to make judgments on his area of expertise. ← 182 | 183 →
Television journalists, however, have no claim to such a monopoly of knowledge in this work. Formal education examinations and certification are not prerequisites to working in television news.
Professional autonomy is diminished by the decision-making apparatus within the company, by factors related to the reporting profession and by interests at different corporate levels. Gitlin takes a stance similar to that of Epstein when, with some irony, he asserts that the legitimacy of a news operation rests mainly on the substantive autonomy of its staff. The audience, he explains, must believe that what they are seeing is not only interesting but true, and reporters must be allowed to feel that they have certain professional privileges. This supposed professional autonomy will be identified by Gitlin as a way of giving a news item credibility in the public eye and for motivating journalists themselves.
Gitlin says, however, that this is a matter of appearances; the journalist must make the audience believe things that are not the same in reality. Gitlin’s entire argument about professional autonomy and the role of the different levels of a news organization is permeated with his view that the company manages the news to maintain the social order. He will say that, to avoid a reputation for having an ax to grind, the top media managers endow their news operations with the appearance … of autonomy; their forms of social control must be indirect, subtle, and not at all necessarily conscious. Their standards flow through the processes of recruitment and promotion, through policy, reward, and the sort of social osmosis that flows overwhelmingly in one direction: downward.
Editors’ lack of knowledge of the news
One of the first obstacles journalists face when defending their autonomy is the editor they work under. Trying to please the editors, obeying them without question, or being unwilling to make the effort to defend their positions may lead journalists to lose their autonomy. Gans holds that writers, therefore, must combine their own judgment with what they think will please their editors. Therefore, if journalists are not interested in a news story or have no firm point of view, they will write only to please ← 183 | 184 → their editors. Sometimes they will do so even when they have a point of view but do not want to work all night rewriting, says Gans. Pleasing editors, however, is more difficult than might be imagined, because they do not always know enough about a story to develop their own judgments.
To Gans’s argument Epstein adds that intervention by the producer or assistant producers in decisions on how to play the news is the rule rather than the exception.
Epstein describes how news is produced in the newsroom: directors decide where to send correspondents and camera crews; assistant editors select what stories will be covered and by whom; editors in the field, in constant phone contact with the head office editors, usually supervise the preparation and filming of stories (in fact, it is not uncommon for correspondents to come into the story after a substantial part has already been filmed); these editors, under the producer’s and correspondent’s supervision, reconstruct the story on video; the narration is written then polished by the field editor, and the final version is usually written by the correspondent; the writers then prepare the lead, which introduces the news story on the program; and the editor makes the final decision about whether the story will be broadcast, reedited or scrapped entirely.
Epstein comments that whatever initiative the newsman has of his own in this collective effort is mitigated by the fact that it must meet the expectation and policies of the producers if it is to get on the air. Over any sustained period of time, news personnel cannot therefore be independent of the wishes of producers who in turn are responsible to network executives for fulfilling the needs and expectations of the organization.
The author also introduces a topic that we will discuss later, which is the conflict of interests within the news organization. These disputes can, in Epstein’s opinion, throw overboard any attempt by the journalist to be objective. In theory, the different levels of a news organization, he will say, share certain objective values about what is newsworthy, values that are not set by the organization but by the profession. However, in practice, company executives may not share these values. The problem then is not one of differences of opinion between editors and journalists, which can be based strictly on how the information is written; the problem is that executives have other interests as well. ← 184 | 185 →
Here we enter the topic of the media as business, which we will address only insofar as it relates to this book. Epstein will say that the problem is even more compelling because, the argument goes, although journalists do not have a clear sphere of control over their material in the news-making process, the decisions in the news are made on the basis of “professional” values –that is, standards that are set outside of the organization, more than in accordance with the organization’s guidelines.
This presumes that all the members of news organizations, whether they be executives or correspondents, share certain outlooks on what constitutes news stories, and will act according to these concepts even when their actions conflict with the interests of the organization that employs them. The problem with this view of professionalism, argues Epstein, is that in practice there are sharp differences in the responsibilities of the various members of news organizations … These different sets of responsibilities necessarily create some tensions between some of the more basic news values of correspondents and organizational values of executives.
Media policies
The second obstacle journalists face in defending their professional autonomy within the company and, therefore, their freedom to report in an objective manner, is the policy of the medium in which they work. This barrier is quasi-journalistic in nature, because the policy of the medium influences some factors that are not exclusively journalistic, such as political or ideological considerations.
The study conducted by Reese and Ballinger serves as an introduction to the topic, as it finds that objectivity as a journalistic ideal can be determined by the policy of the medium. These two authors are categorical in affirming that enforcing the medium’s policy on “what is news” obviously contradicts journalistic standards of objectivity. If the news is defined as “what is out there waiting to be reported”, obviously it will not always be possible to achieve this ideal. According to these authors, the journalist has a clear idea of his duty to be objective, but the norms of the medium sometimes do not allow him to exercise his objectivity as he understands it. ← 185 | 186 →
Reese and Ballinger refer to Breed’s explanation of the different ways in which journalists understand the policy (of the medium): the policy is defined as “the more or less consistent orientation shown by a paper, not only in its editorial but in its news columns and headlines as well, concerning selected issues and events”.
To prevent tension, Reese and Ballinger suggest, the enforcement of the policy is done indirectly and managed in a friendly way. As objectivity must be reconciled in some way with editorial policy, techniques have emerged such as editorial blue-penciling – teaching reporters which objectionable phrases to omit in the future, occasional reprimands, internal house organ papers, and rare explicit policy decisions.
Reese and Ballinger also quote Leo Rosten, who showed in his work that reporters are aware that they have to deviate from the facts to avoid being fired.
While the journalist may wish to observe certain norms of objectivity, he is not always able to do so. Reese and Ballinger reduce the problem to a conflict between the journalist and his boss. It seems to them that, left to themselves, journalists would tell the truth. In our opinion, however this opinion is oversimplified. On the one hand, the journalist must make the effort, as other authors will argue, to tell the truth, even though he is employed by a news organization. His place in the organization is a reality for the journalist, not a theoretical assumption. Thus, our position can be summarized by saying that the journalist has the duty to make the effort to transmit the truth to the public, within the limitations imposed by the news organization.
Reese and Ballinger paraphrase Breed: “I (Breed) made a contribution on the conflict between the publisher and its policy, as against the reporter’s effort to follow the journalistic norms of accuracy, objectivity, responsibility and fair play”.6 Breed’s stance is referred to in journalistic circles even today. James Boylan, for example, cites Breed in his historical review of the reporter–publisher conflict, focusing on the reporters’ counterattack on [media] policy … including the formation of journalism reviews, the ← 186 | 187 → new independence of reporters in Vietnam, and the like. Boylan called this the “unending conflict between Truth and Getting Along”. Like Breed, he implies that, if left alone, reporters will produce truth.
To the topic of media policy as an obstacle to the journalist’s objectivity (as he understands it), Epstein adds the element of image: Policy can determine not only whether or not a subject is seen on television but also how it is depicted.
The conflict between the media policy and journalists generates a problem of interests. On the one hand are the journalists who supposedly want to defend their autonomy and on the other is the company and its policy, which may not be in line with the journalist’s ideology. For Epstein, the news organization’s power is often stronger than the journalist’s strength of conviction when decisions must be made. The organization wins the fight because it owns the medium, and the journalist has no alternative but to go along. He identifies another concern, which is that network news may systematically use its presumed power to select pictures of society that favor certain political groups and values and denigrate others. Underlying Epstein’s arguments is the idea that the medium can be used to obtain power.
Another issue also emerges from Gitlin and Gans, both of whom conducted field observations by working in news chains. Since the apparition of the news chain and the consequent concentration of the media, it is even more difficult for journalists to rely on their professional autonomy. The large chains sell images to smaller channels because the latter trust the products of the former. Therefore the images that the large chains, ABS, NBC and CBS, want to broadcast will standardize the frames through which information reaches the public.
This is the criticism of chain news made by then Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Agnew’s critique contains interesting elements that are in complete concordance with the idea of the mass media sociologists that organizational interests and media policy are more relevant than journalists’ own decisions. Agnew comments on the powerful influence of television and the monopoly of the large chains, adding that network news is determined … by a handful of men responsible only to their corporate employers, an assertion that disregards the role of professional autonomy and the journalist’s responsibility to the public. He continues. “[these men] ‘wield ← 187 | 188 → a free hand in selecting, presenting and interpreting the great issues in our nation’ with broad ‘powers of choice’ over which news pictures to select and which to reject”. Agnew’s criticism of television networks is closely linked to the mechanistic application of journalistic routines. In his view, the decisions that journalist can make have no bearing on such procedures, and indeed, “this small group of executives, producers and correspondents can, by selecting the news, ‘create national issues overnight’, ‘make or break by their coverage and commentary a moratorium on the war’, ‘elevate men from obscurity to national prominence’, ‘reward some politicians with national exposure and ignore others’, and determine ‘how much of each side of a great issue’ will be presented to the public”. Furthermore, as this limited group of network executives “tend to share certain similar views and working conditions that proceed in part from the business, and nature, of the medium, ‘a narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news’”.
The abridged view, Agnew argued, which tends to emphasize scenes depicting the more dramatic moments of violence, lawlessness and embittered dissent, “becomes in the minds of millions the entire picture”, and one that can undermine “our national search for internal peace and stability”. Agnew refers to the power of the press, how it puts pictures into our heads, how it has no external controls, how it resolves the problems of justice between parties and, related to this, and something that the mass media sociologists will find irresistible, how it can endanger the stability of the nation.
Epstein says that this organizational power limits the reporter’s power to seek, select and present the news. His argument is related to the functioning of news chains, where he conducted his investigation. In his experience, both economic and legal considerations were taken into account in the company’s search for potential benefits and in detriment to the freedom of the journalist.
It appears to Epstein that journalists in all television networks are not “free” to choose the news they think is best. To think so, he says, would be to seriously ignore a number of built-in constraints which over the course of time may severely limit and shape the discretion of individuals in gathering, selecting and presenting news. Epstein gives the example of ← 188 | 189 → how affiliate stations must “select and approve” the programs before they are shown on national television. This is because, legally, affiliate stations are not obligated to air any network programs, and therefore the network news cannot, in terms of content and presentation, deviate too much or for too long from the expectations and standards of its affiliates. Moreover, Epstein will say that the very fact that broadcasting is licensed and regulated by the federal government, which makes both the affiliated stations and the networks dependent for their continuing existence on some measure of government approval, must be taken into account by the networks in their overall policies on news coverage and presentation. And the economic realities of network television, reflected in budgets and schedules, restrict the choices of stories available to news personnel.
Epstein reaches the conclusion that the news organization has resolved the problems of gathering information through a series of routines that can also endanger objectivity. As Epstein has already been quoted as saying herein, the news is the result of both journalistic procedures and the journalist’s decisions. Therefore, says Epstein, that finally, established routines and procedures for gathering information and narrowing down the list of possible stories reduce the opportunities for politically selecting news stories … In short, the outputs on network news are not simply the arbitrary choices of a few men; they result from a process.
Epstein asks if indeed a relatively stable process structures and performs the decisions of individuals engaged in news operations, what is its precise relation to the pictures of society projected on television as news? To what degree and in what ways do organizational inputs – such as economic, political and affiliative considerations –influence the news outputs? Certainly such questions also are of political concern.
The news organization as a commercial enterprise
The symbiosis between a news organization with its own aims and the company’s product, the news, can result in situations where one component disagrees with the other. The mass media sociologists believe that such disagreement can noticeably damage the ideal of objectivity for which ← 189 | 190 → journalists strive. In his investigation, Gitlin came to the conclusion that media images and stories were manufactured, not because the business had an especially propagandist or false aim compared to other businesses or professions, but because news organizations have their own particular ends. This led to his finding that journalists were not unfettered seekers of the truth and that, unfortunately, they sometimes made mistakes. To Gitlin it seems that the question of distortion was only a prelude to the larger question of how a finite human organization could presume to claim, “That’s the Way it is”, and what happens when the humans who worked for them disagreed about how things were … or what might be useful (to them) to say or show.
However, Gitlin’s criticisms and irony seem to disregard, or at least to scornfully simplify what a journalist can accomplish with his work. Journalists are not asked to see things as God sees them, but simply to have an objective attitude and to reflect reality as well as they can. What seems to bother Gitlin is that the media claim to tell the truth. It bothers him because he sees that there are some facts that the media does not acknowledge. His thinking can be summarized as follows: On one side, journalists attempt to draw a picture of reality; but there is an organization behind these journalists with its own ends, ends that can come into conflict with those of the journalists and can hinder journalists from reporting this reality.
Shoemaker and Reese affirm that the organization affects the content of the news and emphasize how this situation creates a chasm between the owners and staff of a news organization. They offer a detailed synopsis of the limitations to journalists’ professional autonomy that come into play at different levels of the organization. In their view, interest about journalist autonomy has risen as the corporate structure of media organizations has become more and more complex.
In the past, the main organizational threat to objectivity was an overeager publisher, anxious to influence news slant. Today, the threat is more abstract. Growing organizational complexity has inserted more hierarchical levels of bureaucracy between front-line media workers and top management. ← 190 | 191 →
Thus, for these authors it is logical that the more distant these corporate levels are from daily newswork, the less sensitive management will be towards the professional interests of the workers at subordinate levels.
In their research, Shoemaker and Reese discovered that the situation is even more threatening in newspapers. They observed that the most negative impact from owners was felt when they attempted to impose their opinions on newspaper content. This is especially worrying in the news media, with its tradition of reporting the news objectively. The authors mentioned note that, unlike radio and television stations, newspapers have traditionally supported political candidates, and they assume that this backing represents a direct political measure taken by the directors, owners or editorial boards. For Shoemaker and Reese, it is worth wondering to what extent these attitudes find their way into the more “objective” pages of a newspaper.
They point out that newspapers have divided their focus between objective news and editorials, placing the latter in a separate page or pages. Different studies have looked at how far newspapers go in interpreting their informative news to make them mesh with the editorial line. When they do make them “fit”, this is an indication that decisions at a high organizational level have substituted the content dictated by objective newsgathering procedures.
Pressure does not only come from within the news company, but also from news sources and the public itself. Gans states that, in his view, news is information which is transmitted from sources to audiences, with journalists – who are both employees of bureaucratic commercial organizations and members of a profession – summarizing, refining, and altering what becomes available to them from sources in order to make the information suitable for their audiences. Because news has consequences, however, journalists are susceptible to pressure from groups and individuals (including sources and audiences) with power to hurt them, their organizations, and their firms.
According to the mass media sociologists studied, many limitations hinder journalists’ ability to put objectivity into practice and to act with professional autonomy, and these restrictions have diverse origins. To time pressures, lack of training in detachment and the lack of insulation from ← 191 | 192 → the public we can add limitations imposed by the nature and structure of the news organization itself, including the divergent views of the corporate hierarchy. The editor, for example, can judge a news story differently than the journalist who wrote the piece. In this example the limitation is news-oriented and is the result of different criteria.
A more remote limitation, but still within the news company, derives from editorial policy. This is the place where news criteria come into conflict with commercial and political ones. A final restriction may come from the newspaper owners, whose aims may be different from those of the reporters. Outside the news organization there are other elements that pressure the reporter, including sources that have appeared in news stories and wish their opinion to be highlighted, and the public or audience, who has some rights in relation to the medium.
Given these different difficulties, which journalists have to face when attempting to be objective, it is easy to understand exactly why mass media sociologists have claimed that the issue of objectivity in the news is difficult to resolve.
Objectivity as an Ethical Ideal for the Journalist
Objectivity, as we have seen, is a necessity for the journalist. Up to now, this necessity seems to be a practical issue more than anything: the authors studied will say it is a way of legitimizing the profession. As we have explained, objectivity is demanded of journalism, it lends importance to facts, reaffirms a method, is a mechanism of defense against attacks and criticism from the public sources in the news and, lastly, it enables journalists to conceal the power they seek to obtain.
This idea of objectivity is prevalent among all of the authors analyzed and leads them to conclude that journalists employ objectivity in the form of the news, as we explained in Chapter 2. Far removed from this notion, however, is the classic approach to objectivity in the profession, as an ethical ← 192 | 193 → ideal of the journalist.7 In general, mass media sociologists subscribe to the idea that the media has resolved the issue of objectivity, which is needed to legitimize the reporting profession, by routinizing it in one way or another. However, they also address the topic of objectivity as a journalistic ideal.
In the first part of this chapter we saw how, of all authors mentioned, Schudson examines in most detail the legitimizing effect of objectivity. After many questions and a variety of laborious analyses, he says that journalists need objectivity. He reaches this conclusion by way of a meticulous historical review that looks at how, at different times in recent history, journalists and their critics have viewed objectivity. He finds it particularly interesting that for many years there has been much interest in grounding the journalist’s work in objectivity, despite the fact that journalists do not have the same professional apparatus of other professionals. Other professionals, he says, are trained to be detached and insulated from their public, and have other resources that they use to guarantee their objectivity.
All of the authors studied agree that objectivity is an ideal, though they do so in different ways: for some, objectivity is an ideal that is virtually ← 193 | 194 → unattainable, very difficult to achieve. And what appears to all of them as a theoretical ideal ends up necessarily as a routine. Apparently, the concept of the ideal is totally contrary to the concept of routine.
To understand how the authors arrive at the concept of objectivity as a routine, it is worth analyzing how they have begun their reasoning with objectivity as an ideal and then came to understand it, for different reasons, in the more limited sense of a routine. This part of Chapter 3 addresses the different reasons for this progression.
First, it is worth considering the way in which the authors tend to confuse, or at least equate, terms that are related to the idea of objectivity but are not objectivity itself. Some arguments are more accurate than others and offer a more precise view. In general, though, they tend to identify objectivity synonymously with truth, impartiality, fairness, credibility, exactness and detachment.
To be fair, none of these authors is attempting a philosophical treatise on objectivity. We are familiar with their aims from Chapter 1. Their most valuable contribution here is their consensus that objectivity is a key element of journalistic work.
In addition to compiling the reasoning of the authors studied herein, in this chapter we introduce some aspects of the thinking of José María Desantes, for two specific aims. First, because he solves the question underlying the first part of the chapter: what characteristics does objectivity have that allow it to legitimize a profession and, in particular, journalism. Second, because Desantes offers what appears to be an adequate definition of objectivity itself.
But, why Desantes? Removed from North American culture but writing in the same era, Desantes produced a very different kind of text than those of the American mass media sociologists. Desantes’ work is a monographic study on truth, which was part of a competition in homage to Profesor Muñoz Alonso, first dean of the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Universidad Complutense. His inclusion herein is understandable because the central topic of his essay is truth in journalism. Still, his is an ethical and legal text, not sociological.
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that addresses morality and man’s duty. It is not therefore advisable to confront Desantes work with that of ← 194 | 195 → the US sociologists; it is like comparing two things that are incomparable: While Desantes’ work is a strictly theoretical ethical and legal monograph on truth in journalism, the work of sociologists discussed herein, with some variations, offers empirical investigation that seeks to describe how journalistic routines and the objective news they produce play a role in social change.
However, the clarity with which Desantes is able to identify the ontological foundation of objectivity and therefore offer reasons as to why it can be demanded in journalism can be used as a backdrop to facilitate the study of how the US sociologists have conceptualized the ideal of objectivity.
First, the ideal of objectivity we refer to must be an ethical ideal. It is ethical because it refers to man, and a good. Now, why is objectivity considered a good? We saw that journalists need this objectivity to legitimize their profession, and so they consider it a good. For the authors studied, this good is located within man himself, in a need he has. And the apparently simple response that sociologists arrived at has a long history, which we have presented.
They arrive at the conclusion that journalists’ need for objectivity is a matter of convenience and power. Before reaching the idea that objectivity is the form of the news, the authors intensively examined the concept, giving it a moral connotation as it refers to man’s actions in the world. In this chapter we have therefore included the authors’ thoughts on objectivity as an ideal.
Regarding the conception of objectivity as an ideal, the authors develop different views ranging from a realist philosophical approach to the notion of objectivity as apparent innocence.
Epstein and Gans: An Approach to Philosophical Realism Applied to News Selection
In our review of the work of mass media sociologists in Chapter 1, we saw that Epstein and Gans were the least influenced by pragmatist ideological thinking; rather, their ideas about the news and how it reproduces reality ← 195 | 196 → were much closer to realism. And the notion of objectivity as an ideal is directly related to the concept of knowledge from a realist perspective.
In Epstein’s view, the journalist’s goal is to produce a news story that reproduces reality as faithfully and exactly as possible. In this affirmation he adds something that is quite interesting to our discussion: The search for accurateness and faithfulness to reality involves a decision on the part of the journalist. This adds a distinctly ethical component to the discussion, that of the decision, the will of the reporter. The notions of decision and will are ethical because they assume the reporter is free to decide.
Epstein’s assertion contains various elements worth analyzing. He uses the word exact, which we will examine below, then says “reproduce the most faithfully possible”. The word reproduce has a connotation of “doing something that has already been done”, “producing again”. It also connotes similarity, doing something again, as well as pattern, “to be a copy of the original”, “bring back what was said and argued before”. The term faithfulness derives from the Latin fidelitas, atis. It is “loyalty, observance of faith that one person owes to another”. But the word has another meaning, which is pertinent to our investigation: “accurateness in carrying out something”. Thus, in this context, faithfulness is related to accurateness.
The argument contains something equally important: faithfulness, which is referred to in relation to a reality. In producing the news, explains Epstein, decisions are made among different options; music and images must be selected from among hundreds of possibilities. It is evident that these choices involve decisions, human actions.
While it is true that the step before the news is the existence of an external reality, one of the ethical dimensions of the journalist’s work is that his decisions must intervene in order to convert this external reality into news. And we will see that, from a realist philosophical perspective, it is precisely this decision that determines the objectivity of a news story. We will not attempt to explain the process of how man knows reality because it is beyond the scope of this thesis. However, it is necessary to pose other questions, such as: How are these decisions made? What criteria are used to decide? Why does the journalist choose one thing and not another?
Epstein’s defense of the intervention of the journalist’s decision in selecting and producing the news is related to the focus of his research, ← 196 | 197 → which, as we saw in Chapter 1, is precisely about selection and production. He criticizes those who work in network news, who commonly argue that the pictures of society shown on television as national news are not the product of decisions within an organization but fixed by some external reality.
Gans agrees that objectivity is an ideal. Like Epstein, he takes the realist’s idea of knowledge, recognizing that the journalist must transmit to the public a reality that is external to himself. But his discussion of the concept of objectivity as an ideal includes other considerations that will be useful to our analysis in this chapter.
Gans’ ideas point the way to a solution to the problem of the inclusion of alternative social movements in the mass media. He believes this solution can be achieved by including “multiple perspectives” in the journalist’s work, and focuses on this topic in the final chapter of the work cited. While examining the topic of multiple perspectives he will offer valuable ideas about objectivity as an ideal. He will say that journalists cannot be objective in their selection of topics, sources or facts. For example, he asks “What objectivity is there in favoring the White House as the main source of national news?” Nevertheless, he will say that journalists must report these sources and facts in an objective way or at least with detachment from their own values and biases.
Gans makes one of the most valuable contributions to the mass media sociologists’ discussion of objectivity as a journalistic ideal. Objectivity – he explains – is the conscious effort to remain detached from one’s personal values. It is not about being detached from the topic chosen; it is about the way in which the facts are gathered and written about. The final story (or research project findings) has neither an investment in the answer nor is a statement supporting the reporter’s or researcher’s values. The journalist, he explains, does not exclude values about which there is consensus, for example, that “we support our troops, our capitalism is the best and our democracy”.
Gans presents an optimistic view of the topic of objectivity as an ideal. In his opinion, this type of objectivity will prevail because when a news organization, or any other company with an ideologically diverse client base, takes sides, especially on issues about which the audience is divided ← 197 | 198 → or even polarized, it runs the risk of turning off a large number of consumers or major advertisers.
Gans goes on to state that objectivity operates on a deliberate and conscious level, the level of intention, not results. He explains the stance of media critics alongside his own, saying that the former tend, and quite effectively too, to focus on the outcome, to point to the underlying values of the news, making them explicit and arguing that other values should also be taken into account. He introduces the issue of objectivity understood as a routine, stating that journalists call this “balance”, and are using it when they publish both sides of a story.
In the discussion of objectivity as a defense mechanism from attacks the journalist may suffer, it was said that this defense implied the omission of complicity or freedom from the consequences that the news may generate. Once again the idea of Gans’ concept of freedom, which reinforces the ethical dimension of objectivity as a human act, can be extracted. Gans is equating the concepts of objectivity and freedom. Furthermore, he will say that objectivity could not long exist without this freedom, for the moment journalists are required to consider the effects of the news on sources and others, they would have to begin assessing their own intent and to relinquish their detachment, especially if they wanted to prevent injury to someone. This freedom to decide, think, evaluate requires a conscious, intentional act.
There are two possible ways of interpreting Gans’ approach to the idea that objectivity is an ideal because it grants freedom to journalists to remove themselves from the consequences that the news can engender. On the one hand, there is an idealist element of freedom as liberation from the barriers to achieving a goal. The other offers a utopian variation, in the sense that it is impossible to write and free oneself from the consequences of the news, reactions from the public and news sources. In the latter sense the idea of objectivity approaches that of a routine. Thus, the topic of routine is introduced when Gans mentions that since freedom can be damaged by the consequences the news can generate, objectivity must be guaranteed by the routine methods to which we have referred.
Gans says that journalists realize, of course, that news has myriad effects, many of which cannot even be anticipated; consequently, they feel ← 198 | 199 → that they are entitled to choose stories, and facts, without first considering the possible consequences.
Gans demonstrates his inclination towards the utopian ideal of objectivity when he quotes Reuven Frank, who says that journalists adopt an artificial innocence. This interesting nuance that the author introduces to the discussion highlights objectivity as an ideal, but one that is convenient to the journalist. This “artificial innocence” breaks Epstein’s more authentic idealism. We could say that innocence is not artificial for Epstein, but a true ideal for the journalist in the practice of his profession. In contrast, the artificial innocence to which Gans refers is the refusal of journalists to alter the story for the purpose of controlling its effects (and) … the newsman’s necessary deliberate detachment from aiming his work or letting someone else aim it to changing society –even for the noblest motive.
Gans’ notion of objectivity as an ideal reflects the orientation of his research, which is shared by most other mass media sociologists referred to here, on how journalistic routines maintain the established social order. Following this is the idea that objectivity offers freedom from the consequences generated by the news. This leads us unavoidably to the topic of how objectivity, transformed into journalistic routine, is used by groups in power to maintain the order in which they have a stake.
For the purposes of this section of the chapter, Gans’ main contribution is his initial assertion that objectivity is an intention, a conscious effort, a deliberate act. Alluding to two other actions of man, that of knowing and that of controlling, he affirms that objectivity as intent is not difficult to implement at the conscious level, for journalists can know and control their own intentions; however, implications, which are determined by the people affected by the news, are not within their control. Effects cannot be turned on and off by journalists, and they accompany the news regardless of the journalists’ intentions or actions.
It is only fair to view the ideas of Epstein and Gans for what they seek to be. They have given sufficient arguments to support the notion of objectivity as an ideal. With their respective differences, they have drawn links between the concept of objectivity and notions such as accurateness, faithfulness to reality, the journalist’s decision, intention, conscious effort, ← 199 | 200 → freedom, and the actions of knowing and controlling. All of these point to the notion of objectivity as an ethical ideal.
Desantes and Mass Media Sociologists
Desantes clearly explains why objectivity is an ethical ideal. He defines objectivity as an attitude, in line with reality and the truth. For the first time in our analysis we are seeing objectivity grounded in concepts unrelated to routines. The almost generalized confusion of many authors (and not only the US sociologists of whom he may or may not have been aware) between the concepts of truth and objectivity when applied to the news will lead Desantes to write his essay on truth in the news. In delving into the topic of objectivity, Desantes cites Pieper, who says that the will must develop the unheard-of activity of allowing itself to be determined, of knowing only through the thing itself, of being objective, of forcing itself to silence, going unnoticed and thereby being able to perceive. Desantes will call this “unheard-of activity” objectivity.
A variety of concepts are mentioned in this statement that Desantes will develop in detail in his text. First and foremost, he will focus on objectivity as the activity of a knowing subject. This knowledge assumes a certain passivity, in that it allows one to be determined without interference from the object known. Effort comes into the frame as the will not to interfere with this perception. As we will see, in classical theory objectivity is not synonymous with truth, but with a guarantee that the subject can offer regarding his disinterested pursuit of the truth. It is the intention and disposition of the subject to adjust his knowledge to reality. For this reason, Desantes will explain that, although it may seem paradoxical, objectivity has a singularly subjective attribution.
He cautions and then confirms that objectivity is an attitude of the subject. Objectivity thus is “man’s authentic cognitive attitude when there is ← 200 | 201 → an external reality to know”.8 The idea of “liberating oneself from oneself” will be widely assimilated by the US sociologists, although in a different way, as we will see below, through the concept of detachment.
To Desantes it seems that all of this modal complexity will make it difficult to maintain objectivity throughout the complex news process. But difficult is not impossible. Objectivity, he will say, is the element or condition or assumption that, along with the will to know, depends on the subject.
Desantes refers to a seminar in Spain some years ago, which focused heavily on a survey conducted by its director on objectivity in the news. The title of the report was Does objectivity in the news exist? Desantes explains that, for some, objectivity in the news was something that referred to information itself: complete information, true information, information stripped of all attempts at interpretation. For other journalists, objectivity was the result of the plurality of sources, or following the middle way that such a plurality offered. For others, objectivity was obtained by contrasting the proof of various sources. For others, it consisted in the honesty or honorability of the reporter. For others, it was ultimately not possible or was a “sublime abstraction”.
This disparity among definitions is what led Desantes, firstly, to clarify all of the terms involved. He explains that the problem of objectivity is quite different when the aim is to communicate facts than when it is to communicate ideas. He adds that the topic of objectivity in the news is where the idea acquires its broadest and deepest implications, as communication of the facts demands that the communication especially correspond to reality.
But, says Desantes, when we speak of objectivity in the news we are not referring to this correspondence, but to the reporter’s attitude towards the reality he must report on. It has already been said that objectivity is a subjective quality that assumes, above all, that the reporting subject is making an effort to know reality and transmit this knowledge. ← 201 | 202 →
From this viewpoint, the objectivity of the reporter consists in allowing himself to be informed by the object of his knowledge to the extent possible and to the degree that is useful for the news, and then in reporting his message in accordance with that knowledge, so that the receiving subject captures it as precisely as possible.
The outcome of knowledge, therefore, will always contain a certain subjective impression. Desantes – who Gans had already initiated at this point – explains that objectivity is an attitude and not an outcome: “objectivity in reporting the facts is not a quality of the news itself that can be demanded with reference to the object, but an attitude of integrity that can be demanded directly of the subject: it is a problem of professional ethics”.
Desantes has already highlighted a real problem for those who wished to theorize about journalistic objectivity, which is confusion among terms, and American mass media sociologists were not immune to this failing. Although none of them offers a definition of objectivity as applied to the news, as Desantes does, in fact they confuse objectivity with a variety of like concepts.
We will therefore attempt to organize these concepts in some measure and analyze how the authors approach the idea of objectivity as an ideal, with reference to other concepts that are also ideals in an ethical sense.
It is particularly interesting to examine the authors’ confusion among different terms. They identify objectivity with truth, impartiality, fairness, credibility, accuracy and, lastly, detachment. This last concept has been especially attractive to US sociologists.
The order chosen is not random. Although there is no order of importance among the different values that are discussed in relation to objectivity as an ideal, we will see that there is some intention to put truth at the fore, and detachment last. Indeed, the concept of truth has been placed first on purpose, because of Desantes’ influence. The foundation of objectivity is closest to truth.
The method we shall use to discuss how the US mass media sociologists address the notion of truth is also different from that used in the rest of this book. We have justified the relevance of Desantes’ thinking to this investigation. Desantes seeks to expose the foundation of objectivity, and does so with evenhandedness; we shall therefore follow the thread of his ← 202 | 203 → reasoning, confronting the US authors along the way. This is not to say that the latter have less merit or that they do not know what the truth is; we have already acknowledged that the search for definitions of objectivity and of truth was quite outside the scope of their investigations. What does interest us here is to see how the mass media sociologists approach a definition that seems to be well founded.
The Concept of Truth in Mass Media Sociology and in the Thinking of José Maria Desantes
To strive for perfection means going from being “a potential being” to “an actual being”. This distinction is fundamental for Ethics, as “being good” in a moral sense means striving to realize goodness, even though no one can ever achieve it completely because moral values are asymptotic. Reality, from a Desantian perspective, is the guiding principle of objectivity in information.
From this perspective, the informative good, the truth, will be that which matches reality and therefore is reportable or communicable.
It is worth looking at how Desantes arrives at his idea of objectivity, through truth and, before that, reality. This will be the point of departure. For the illustration to be logical, it is best to begin with the concept of reality the author offers. For this definition Desantes refers to the term’s epistemology, saying that reality originates from the Latin res, which means “thing” in a very broad sense. He explains that he will follow a commonly accepted idea: that, philosophically, reality means the essence of the thing, that which makes the thing, itself. Information involves “giving mental form to reality to make it known”. Reality, therefore, is the prior informative assumption. Realistic information takes reality as its initial reference point, not only the intellectual capacity of the reporter. Information is reality itself, put into a form that delivers it to the receiving subject. Reality is thus the paradigm, the primordial fact, the point of departure, the “condition sine qua non of information”. ← 203 | 204 →
Desantes relates the theme of reality to truth with an idea from Pieper: “truth means manifestation and demonstration of real things. In consequence, the truth is subordinated. Truth does not exist in and of itself. The first thing that always precedes it is things the way they are, what is real”. Desantes will cite the classical ideas of ontological truth (reality in itself) and logical truth (reality as it is known), adding informative truth, which is truth that is known through communication.
To explain the relation between reality and truth, Desantes will use the definition proposed in the X century by Isaac Israeli: “truth is the equation of thing and intellect”. For the topic of interest to us herein, we will say that the ontological truth is the adaptation of the thing to the intellect, and the logical truth is the adaptation of the intellect to the thing. In this regard, knowing presupposes the presence of reality before understanding and assumes that the knowledge conforms to the preexisting reality.
It might seem that all of the above reasoning is but utopian, when it comes to knowing realities as complex as those journalists are often faced with. But Desantes is not naive; he admits that for man it is impossible to directly know all of reality and all realities. He lists some of man’s limitations, including his chronological and spatial limitations, the impossibility of dividing his attention among many real objects at the same time and the specialization of social life as reality becomes more complex. These, he says, force man to know the truth not by directly applying his knowledge to reality, but by communicating the truth obtained from another subject who has made such a direct application. And he who receives the communicated truth can in turn communicate it to another, and so on.
Information, then, does not refer to communication between the subject with direct knowledge and another willing to receive the communicated truth, but communication between the subject and many others, whether identified, identifiable or unidentifiable.
What Desantes calls reported truth is therefore social or community communication, in that it holds knowledge of reality. This criteria is logically subject to logical truth, which itself is subject to ontological truth.
In referring to the truth, the US sociologists obviously do not delve as deeply as Desantes. For them, the explanation is simple: they refer to the truth as it applies to some topic of interest to them. It is not within their ← 204 | 205 → purview to resolve how one arrives at the truth. Through their statements, however, we can identify different approaches to the concept of truth, some of which are closer to, others more distant from, Desantes’ arguments.
Gans agrees in some measure with the theory of realistic knowledge that Desantes’ adheres to when he states that it is possible to empirically examine external reality. He says that basic philosophical concerns about the existence of external reality and about whether it can be grasped by empirical methods are not at issue here, for most critics of the news agree with journalists and most social scientists that empirical inquiry about external reality is possible, adding that he will also ignore the problem that many journalistic facts are not amenable to empirical testing but are attributed opinions.
Neither will he debate whether it is possible to define what journalists call “the facts”. It is true that Gans does not undertake an intensive theoretical study of whether we can know reality, nor does he offer explanations about his assertion; but, by making this comment, we assume that he recognizes the possibility of knowledge from a realist philosophical perspective.
By saying that these concepts are based in reality, Gans accepts that reality is a presupposition of knowledge. His problem is not how one arrives at knowledge from the truth; rather, his interest lies in the selection of the news. For Gans, the issue is what facts from this reality should become news. Even empirically determinable facts do not arise out of thin air but are fashioned out of concepts and specific empirical methods. And concepts themselves are based on reality and value judgments, and different judgments produce different concepts. But when concepts – or methods – differ, so do the resulting facts.
It can be understood that the concepts Gans refers to are based on reality and value judgments about this reality. As those judgments can differ, so therefore can the concepts about a particular reality.
Gans’ question about facts and reality is related to his basic idea about which facts can become news, and he indirectly touches on the theme of reality in exploring this question. It can be seen, then, that although he believes in the existence of an external reality from which the facts for the news come, his central concern is which of those facts about reality will be ← 205 | 206 → selected to become news. His question is more practical. It does not inquire as to how journalists know this external reality.
Gans then summarizes how the news cannot show reality. He explains that many questions can be asked about the actors and activities which now appear in, or are omitted from, the news. Consequently, news can be considered distorted for asking questions which a standard setter considers to be wrong or for using the wrong concepts to frame correct questions, or for employing the wrong methods. We deduce from this that Gans believes that a news story will show reality when it employs the right methods and the right questions.
Walter Lippmann is not considered to be a mass media sociologist. This is partly due to timing, as we have mentioned, but also because, more than a sociologist, he is seen to practice political psychology. Lippmann has introduced terms into our political vocabulary, and his work is closer to political science than to journalism. He examines the power of public opinion, which before his time was terra incognita. All of the authors quote Lippmann at different times, Schudson was strongly influenced by Lippmann, and thus we have included him in this examination of the truth. Schudson’s concept of the truth is taken from Lippmann, and therefore we must look to the latter in our analysis of what Schudson has said about truth.
Another plausible argument for including Lippmann in this discussion is that he offers a novel linkage between the news and truth, one that is completely opposite to that of Desantes, whose argument has been our main thread. Lippmann states that the news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. He uses the argument that the function of news is to signalize an event, while the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts and set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.
Lippmann’s assertion, explains Schudson, is influenced by his bias that powerful agents supply the news they want aired to the media.
In this regard, it is clear that Lippmann would not conceive of the truth as Desantes explains it. For Lippmann, the news does not always tell the truth because, he has shown, the media publish what the wire services ← 206 | 207 → give them, regardless of whether they are true facts. Now, it seems fair to indicate that Lippmann’s description does not imply a theory of knowledge that contradicts that of Desantes. On the one hand, he has never said that man is not capable of knowing reality, and therefore, of telling the truth. On the other, his intention is to show what we have already said: to say that false news can arrive at the newspaper. His initial assertion that the news does not coincide with the truth does not contradict Desantes’ reasoning: he has not said that the news, in Desantian terms, is not the reported truth. Clearly he has another intention. Lippmann’s concern for the truth is a practical concern related to the availability of facts that journalists can trust.
Lippmann mentions two terms that he sees as related to truth: responsibility and trustworthiness. Introducing responsibility to the discussion draws attention to the ethical dimension of the concept of truth. Thus, in our discussion thus far we can link the arguments of Gans and Lippmann together in the following manner: will–freedom–decision–responsibility.
Schudson touches on the concept of truth in his historical analysis when he says that truth is called into doubt when public relations appear on the scene. Adhering to Lippmann’s concept of “hidden facts”, it seems to him that there can be truth only when facts are spontaneous, and not generated by institutions. Apparently, Schudson believes only in the truth of natural facts and not in the good intention of those who can produce cultural facts.
Schudson’s idea can be viewed in relation to the general orientation of the mass media sociologists. There is an underlying belief that those in power use journalistic routines to manipulate events and thereby maintain a social order that suits them. He asserts that, beginning in the 1920s, it became more and more difficult to determine what the news should be, especially if credibility of the government and independent agencies is in doubt. If events are spontaneous, random occurrences, if they are relatively unbiased sampling of the hidden facts, then a newspaper could be content to report the news and feel it had done an important job responsibly.
Schudson believes firmly that reporters create reality. From a realist’s perspective, this makes him pessimistic with regard to journalists’ transmission of the truth because, if reality is constructed by public relations, there is no access to the truth, and therefore, in his opinion, it would be ← 207 | 208 → very difficult to aspire to the truth. From this point of view, he would seem to be right if, as Schudson believes, there is intentionality in this construction of reality.
As, according to Schudson, events themselves are constructed by the individuals and institutions with the most wealth and power in society, then reporting the news is not just an incomplete approach to the truth but a distorted one. With the rise of public relations in the 1920s and the idea that the government can manage the news, it grew more difficult for the conscientious journalist to be satisfied that getting the news is sufficient.
The greatest difference between the thinking of Desantes and that of Schudson is that the latter does not link objectivity to facts of reality. In his historical review, he says that objectivity follows the belief that facts can be transmitted as they occur. Compared to the other authors, this proposal is quite novel. We have seen that there are myriad approaches to the concept of objectivity, but they always refer to its relation to the facts. As we saw in the first section of this chapter, to Schudson objectivity in this sense means that assertions of one person about the world can be trusted if they are subject to consensus.
This examination of Desantes’s thinking has allowed us to see how the authors approach or distance themselves from the idea of truth grounded in material reality. The two authors who discuss this theme are Gans and Schudson, with the latter inspired by Lippmann. Both authors are representative of two of the more extreme currents in the theory of knowledge. Gans, in recognizing that reality exists outside of the observer and can be known by him, deduces that journalistic truth is inspired by knowledge of this reality. Quite the contrary, Schudson, influenced to a large extent by pragmatic ideas and the theory of the construction of reality, will not see the relation between the facts of reality and the truth that the media transmit. Disenchanted by propagandistic efforts to “distort this truth”, he deduces that the facts are defined by consensus.
The authors, interested in the topic of objectivity, see it mirrored in a variety of like concepts: impartiality, credibility, accurateness, fairness and detachment. The mass media sociologists use them as synonyms, but ultimately they propose that, through them, objectivity, a condition of journalistic work, is guaranteed. ← 208 | 209 →
Impartiality and Fairness in Mass Media Sociology
Impartiality has to do with the absence of prejudice or judgment of things beforehand, or judging only after having sufficient knowledge of things.
Among the authors studied, Schudson uses the term synonymously with objectivity. He refers to the ideas of Israel Scheffler, who identifies objectivity with a commitment to fair control over one’s statements. There is a notion of fairness in Scheffler’s objectivity. Indeed, the idea of fairness is recurrent in the US sociologists’ discussions of objectivity. This is not simply coincidence; as we will see, the notion of fairness, as many of the authors understand it, is related to objectivity as a practice or routine. The authors have even sought to measure fairness in quantitative terms. And fairness will be identified as one of the notions that journalists arm themselves with as a defense mechanism.
Objectivity, for Schudson, is a commitment to impartiality and detachment. This is the first and only appearance among these authors of the concept of objectivity as impartiality. Schudson identifies impartiality with detachment, with divesting oneself from one’s personality or way of thinking. We will focus more on the idea of detachment below. The concept of impartiality is closer to that of detachment than to objectivity itself. For Schudson, quoting Scheffler, both impartiality and detachment are distinctive features of scientific objectivity.
The most popular synonym for objectivity among the authors studied is fairness. They understand fairness in its distributive sense of giving each side its due. Understood thus, fairness can certainly be used to endorse Schudson’s concept of objectivity as a routine in journalism. Indeed, this may explain why the authors refer to fairness so frequently; it is no coincidence that the so-called Fairness Doctrine has been developed in large measure to guarantee objectivity.
For the authors, one of the beneficiaries of fairness is the public itself. Gans’ intention to emphasize the conscience of the journalists, the idea that they owe something to the public, is evident. In this regard, he understands objectivity as fairness in the relation between one person and another. He will view objectivity as a central component of the profession, the ← 209 | 210 → professional obligation to protect audiences who cannot gather their own news, from being misled by people who, having “axes to grind”, would withhold information contrary to their values. Journalists believe, furthermore, that their role is to supply information that will enable the audience to come to its own conclusions.
Gans examines fairness as a goal in relation to the unwanted consequences that the news can generate, an issue that has been addressed extensively by mass media sociology. Journalists are often not to blame for the consequences of the news they write. When implications fall outside these areas or are unpredictable, journalists apply a further consideration, which they call fairness.
One more proof of the interest in equating objectivity with fairness will be offered by Gans, when he says that journalists who believe they have acted fairly can refuse to shoulder the blame for charges leveled against them. Fairness will be a recurring theme among these authors because of its implications for the incorporation of dissident movements into the news. In this regard, Gans says that fairness is determined in accordance with the enduring values, which is why socially and morally disorderly actors need not to be treated fairly. While fairness is a matter of intent, like objectivity, Gans explains that fairness is also regulated by the libel laws, in television, by F. C. C. rules, and he offers an example that clarifies how editors work to ensure social stability.
Accuracy and Credibility in Mass Media Sociology
Accuracy and objectivity appear in the US Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.
Epstein uses two different words when referring to objectivity: accuracy and imitation. We have already referred to accuracy in our discussion of objectivity as an ideal, and to imitation when alluding to the “mirror metaphor”. ← 210 | 211 →
As we move farther and farther from truth as a reference point for objectivity, the ideal of objectivity is diluted more and more, giving way to more practical concepts and an approach to objectivity as a routine. Gans, as we saw in the first part of this chapter, sees that objectivity is reinforced by the need to protect the journalist’s credibility. The link he makes between credibility and objectivity is based on a need more than an ideal. He claims that the public has a certain duty to believe that journalists are objective, and this need provides the foundation for their credibility.
Again, this is not grounded in a quality of objectivity, but in what is useful for the system. Gans says that, if journalists were not seen to be objective, each news story could be criticized for having one or another journalistic bias, and the large number of television viewers and readers could come to doubt the news itself.
Because of this, Gans claims that objectivity is also a commercial consideration. Like Schudson, Gans makes the common reference to the Associated Press … having invented objectivity in order to sell uniform wire-service news to a politically and otherwise diverse set of local newspapers.
The Matter of Detachment
There is another issue that concerns all of the authors in regard to objectivity. They identify objectivity as detachment from the journalist’s own values. Synonyms of this term include objectivity, dispassion, disinterest, open-mindedness, neutrality, impartiality, indifference, aloofness, disconnection, disengagement, separation, removal.
The topic of detachment has been addressed from different perspectives. First, the authors wonder how journalists, as people with values, can detach themselves from their values when dealing with a topic that they must recount to the public. Gans, in line with his argument about objectivity as a utopian ideal, says that journalists attempt to be objective, but neither they nor anyone can, ultimately, act without values. Furthermore, reality judgments are never altogether divorced from values. Time pressures ← 211 | 212 → make his central theme, story selection … a decision-making and choice, making process, but a hurried one. This presents detachment from personal values as an even more challenging endeavor.
Gans states that journalism resembles other empirical disciplines and professions in its aim to be objective: to be free from values and ideology; accordingly, journalists practice value exclusion. Of course, objectivity is itself a value, but journalists try to exclude values in the narrower sense of the term: as preference statements about nation and society.
He says that editorials, commentary, and at the magazines, the endings of some stories are exempted from value exclusion; the primary task in story selection, however, is, as one top editor put it, to tell the readers this is what we think is important, and we hope they’ll feel the same way, but our aim isn’t ideological.
Gans believes that in selecting a story it is impossible to ignore one’s values, as the selection itself demands that the selector use value judgments. For important judgments, which include both national values and lasting values, journalists do make preference statements about nation and society. Value exclusion is therefore accompanied by value inclusion, both through story selection and as opinions expressed in specific stories.
Journalists cannot act without values. But Gans distinguishes between two different levels of values. Detachment demands that the journalist disengage himself from values and opinions that could slant a news story; but obviously the journalist cannot but use values as criteria for selecting a news story and sharing it with the public. In the author’s example, these include values about the nation, democracy and capitalism. Indeed, the journalist is required to have values, and if he did not then he could not perform his job. Enduring values, explains Gans, are built into discernment of the news, and as a result most of these values and opinions penetrate the audience unconsciously.
Gans cites Meter Schrag: “Every reporter operates with certain assumptions about what constitutes normative behavior, if not the good society, and the more objective he tries to be, the more likely those assumptions will remain concealed”. Like any other person, the journalist cannot operate without values, and therefore the ones concealed in their work make it possible for them to leave their conscious personal values “at home”. ← 212 | 213 →
Gans says that the exclusion of conscious values implies the exclusion of conscious ideology, but the ways in which journalists reject ideology and deal with it when it appears to provide further insight into the workings of objectivity – and an understanding of how unconscious values, and thereby unconscious ideology, enter into news judgment. Once again we see the different levels of values: those shared by the nation that should not be excluded from the news, and journalists’ personal values, which should be left out.
The ways in which journalists carry out this exclusion have already been mentioned: Journalists seek to exclude conscious values and they do so in three ways: through objectivity, the disregard of implications, and the rejection of ideology (as they define it). Gans then clearly affirms what we have attempted to demonstrate: Value exclusion … is not solely a goal but also a practical consideration, for it defends journalists against actual or possible criticism, and protects them against demands by powerful critics for censorship and self-censorship.
Gans makes a distinction between facts and values, arguing that neither journalism nor social sciences can operate without values or the implications of values. Empirical work cannot be value free or completely “detached”. The social scientist, says the author, must be as objective as humanly possible without renouncing value judgments; he must abstain from making quick, oversimplified judgments and show why people behave the way they do, especially when their behavior violates common standards.
Schudson’s contribution is along the lines of Gans’. He mentions that in the early twentieth century, even at the New York Times, it was uncommon for journalists to see a sharp divide between facts and values. Schudson attributes objectivity to the journalist’s belief that he can and should separate facts from values. Facts, in this view, are assertions about the world open to independent validation. They stand beyond the distorting influences of any individual’s personal preferences.
In Schudon’s view, values are located in the conscience of the individual or in his unconscious preferences about the way the world should be. They are viewed as ultimately subjective and so without legitimate claim on other people. The belief in objectivity is a faith in facts, a distrust of values, and a commitment of their segregation. ← 213 | 214 →
Since, unlike Gans, Schudson makes no distinction between two kinds of values, he therefore represents the radical stance, in a completely negative sense, that it is impossible for journalists to detach themselves from their values. He says that the close linkage between detachment and objectivity makes it impossible to obtain the latter without the former. He says that, since absolute objectivity in journalism is an impossibility, the social heritage, the professional reflexes, the individual temperament, and the economic status of reporters assume a fundamental significance.
In quoting Scheffler, Schudson adds another nuance to his discussion. He explains that impartiality and detachment are not to be thought of as substantive qualities of the scientist’s personality or the style of his thought; scientists are as variegated in these respects as any other group of people … What is central is the acknowledgment of general controls to which one’s dearest beliefs are ultimately subject.
Professional Autonomy Is Achieved Through an Implicit Agreement
According to the mass media sociologists, journalists practice detachment to justify their professional autonomy. Gans explains this when he states that journalists justify their right to individual autonomy by the pursuit of objectivity and detachment; in a way, they strike an implied bargain, which allows them autonomy in choosing the news in exchange for leaving out their personal values. The outcome restricts the news to facts (or attributed opinions), which, journalists argue, are gathered objectively. This objectivity derives from the use of similar fact-gathering methods; like scientific method, journalistic method is validated by consensus.
Just as important, Gans says, is that the methods themselves are considered objective, because when journalists are detached they are not invested in the outcome of the story.
The concepts of objective method, detachment and fairness are intermingled. Obviously, the conclusion is that journalists pursue these ideals ← 214 | 215 → for their own benefit. As Gans states, most journalists fully realize that objective methods provide no guidelines for the selection either of stories or of which facts go into stories. Nevertheless, in making the selection, journalists strive to be objective, both in intent, by applying personal detachment; and in effect, by disregarding the implications of the news. They do not choose the news on the basis of whom it will help or hurt; and when they cannot ignore implications, they try to be fair.
Detachment as a guarantor of professional autonomy for journalists brings us closer to the idea of objectivity as a journalistic routine. In effect, detachment is a convenient way of avoiding problems.
Detachment to Avoid Controversy
Gans’ last assertion seems quite contrary to the disinterested ideal of objectivity with which we began this argument. It shows that objectivity defined as detachment in both senses, both as an ideal to strive for and a way of unlinking oneself from the potential effect of a news story, enables journalists to reach evaluative conclusions and express opinions.
In the author’s words, as long as their intent is to exclude conscious personal values, then opinions become “subjective reactions”, which follow from objectively gathered facts. Thus, he says, journalistic values are seen as reactions to the news rather than a priori judgments which determine what becomes newsworthy. Investigative reporters, who always end with explicit value judgments, often pick a topic because they smell a good story, not because they have already passed judgment on the target of their investigation.
We return to the topic of intention when Gans says that journalists try hard to live up to their definition of objectivity. Most train themselves, or are trained, to practice value exclusion, and many do not vote in order to preserve their political detachment.
The matter of detachment translates into a practical question for the news organization. The media companies that Gans studied preferred to ← 215 | 216 → hire people who kept their values to themselves. However, it seemed just as important to those who hire reporters, especially those in the national media, that they recruit people who do not hold strong personal values in the first place. They have no prior values about the topics which become news, nor do they always develop them about topics on which they are working.
Gans’ approach to objectivity as a value leads him unavoidably to the idea of objectivity as a routine and a practical need for the journalist. News organizations have a variety of organizational mechanisms that strengthen objectivity and detachment. He explains, for example, that reporters are rewarded for getting the story … General reporters move so quickly from story to story that they do not have time to develop attachment, while those covering emotionally charged stories like wars and election campaigns are rotated frequently to preserve detachment. Story selectors, on the other hand, rarely are out of their offices long enough to become involved; they are detached by their duties.
Mass media sociology does not address the topic of detachment in the way that Desantes has done. However, it does recognize that a large measure of objectivity is based on the journalist’s detachment from his own values and opinions. Some seem confused by this; Gans is the only one who distinguishes between two planes of values and ideology. Value judgments are necessary for news selection and this is where the US social scientists get bogged down. In their desire to make detachment a radical rejection of anything involving personal values, they become utopian and reach the logical conclusion that since it is not possible to detach oneself from ideology, objectivity is very difficult to achieve.
The need for detachment begins as an ideal and, like objectivity, is transformed into the journalist’s shield of defense against attacks.
The effort the US mass media sociologists expend in searching for a way to make objectivity a professional ideal is laudable, especially because all of them begin by emphasizing this idea. The confusion with other terms originates in their insistence on searching for synonyms for objectivity. The authors advance, some more steadily than others, towards a definition of objectivity that seems plausible to us for reasons already explained: Desantes’ definition. ← 216 | 217 →
Our order has not been random: we began with objectivity grounded in the truth, followed by impartiality and fairness, credibility and accuracy and finally, detachment. Through these different concepts, we saw that objectivity began for the authors as an ethical ideal and then was gradually transformed into a method or routine. Already in the notions of impartiality and justice we see the authors explaining how these concepts are used as a defense mechanism against potential attacks from the public. Such was the need for this kind of protection that the notion had to be legislated, giving rise to the Fairness Doctrine.
The sad demise of objectivity as an ideal can be blamed on prejudice against the concept of detachment. The authors identify objectivity as detachment from the journalist’s personal values in the performance of his work. As we have already shown, the confusion that emerges between the two planes of detachment from values leads the authors to conclude that detachment itself will make journalists less objective. The core of the issue is the authors’ assertion that, for journalists, objectivity is a method, a consensus, a defense shield against attacks by their critics and a way of ignoring the consequences that the news can generate.
We finalize this part of Chapter 3 with the notion of detachment for another reason. The idea of detachment from one’s own values alludes to another theme, that of the barriers journalists face when attempting to be objective. The barrier presented by the difficulty in detaching could be called internal, as it originates in the journalist himself. Now, there are a series of other obstacles that the authors identify that hinder the journalist from practicing objectivity free from restraint. All of these other obstacles are external, that is, they originate outside of the journalist himself and, therefore, he cannot control them.
At first glance, the two schools of thought identified – the classical one, represented by Desantes, and the one presented by the mass media sociologists – would seem to be contradictory; as contradictory as the concepts of ideal and routine. But a closer examination of the views of the mass media sociologists allows us to reconcile these two apparently opposing viewpoints. Objectivity can be defined as the journalist’s attitude: toward telling the truth, being impartial and fair, transmitting accurate and credible information and detaching himself from his own values. But the ← 217 | 218 → journalist’s work is also unavoidably affected by a series of factors we have already mentioned: time pressures, staff and budget constraints, and limited time and space for this work. Objectivity in the news can therefore be determined by the journalist’s decision to apply, honestly and responsibly, a series of routines that guarantee, in each particular case, the transmission of the truth in his stories. We have added the phrase “in each particular case” to this definition because these routines cannot just be applied automatically. The journalist needs to treat each fact individually, deciding which routines he will use to produce each story.
1 Italics added.
2 Ibid. p. 10.
3 Ibid. pp. 3–4.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid. p. 269.
6 Reese, personal conversation with Warren Breed (Ibid. p. 651).
7 Almost all manuals of journalistic ethics refer to the topic of objectivity. As an example we can cite Emmanuel Derieux, who states that objective information is the relating of occurrences that are considered or that we wish to consider, perfectly in line with the factual reality: faithful, precise, exact, truthful. To reach objectivity, he adds, it is necessary to have a great deal of steadfastness and attention in observing and analyzing occurrences, in order to reach “the attainment and dissemination of information in an almost scientific manner” (Emmanuel Derieux, op. cit., p.136). Referring to José María Desantes, María José Lecaros points out that objectivity is an attitude of the journalist. Objectivity requires in the journalist “a certain interior silence that allows the reality he wants to know to modify his mind; and this implies silencing one’s own judgments, prejudices and preconceived ideas to that reality can impact him with all its force” (María José Lecaros, Ética Periodística (Santiago: Ediciones Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 1989), p. 71). In a more up to date work, Bettetini and Fumagalli assert that the notion of objectivity should be understood as a practical rule of adjusting the facts to the dimensions of knowledge and opinion that we can assume are comprehended and shared by the public to which the story is directed. They add that objectivity is a valid value journalists, how are “honest in the practice of their profession as a public service”. Gianfranco Bettetini and Armando Fumagalli, Lo que queda de los Medios (Pamplona: Eunsa, 2001), p. 39 [own translation].
8 Thus, objectivity is not a passive objectivity of the subject, but an effort to free oneself from oneself in a cognitive process that allows the truth to emerge unobstructed, harmonizing reality and intellect (Ibid. p. 42).