It turns out that trying to track down the origins of objectivity in news is sort of like trying to track down the origins of some of the water in a river. This is probably true of any cultural or intellectual phenomenon: the sources of an idea as it is adopted and adapted by large groups of people are many and none at the same time. But I was on a quest nonetheless. I began diligently checking out stacks of books from the library and surrounding myself at my kitchen table in Ohio, spent a winter flipping through tales of 1830s penny papers and personal vendettas among famous newspapermen and a spring digging into histories of alternative media outlets, trying to figure out this code of professional conduct that’s so widely accepted today.
Living in small-town Ohio was lonely, and I had a lot of time to think—when I wasn’t wandering through the damp, lush woods, I wandered through these books looking for answers. But I was also fighting loneliness, looking for people in whom I could see myself, and my own resistance to orthodoxy. I wanted to find people who’d critically asked the questions I was beginning to ask: Who is journalism for? Do we do it for the community and, if so, which community? Or is it for the market, the bosses, the business? Is the goal to maximize audiences, donations, profits? If we claim to serve the public, then which public do we serve?
At first, I found what I’d expected: lots of “great men” stories about Edward R. Murrow and Upton Sinclair and Walter Lippmann. There was also a constant sense, especially in more recent texts, that a heyday of “real” journalism is behind us and ethics have gone to the wolves and somehow the internet is to blame, and it’s such a disaster that just anyone who wants to be a journalist these days can claim the title and so on. But I did learn that the guiding ideal of “objectivity” in news, at least in those terms, was less than a hundred years old, with its precursors—ideas like independence, nonpartisanship, balance, neutrality, and detachment—only emerging in the mid- to late 1800s. Even then, there were people who disliked these developments and spoke out against them, and these disagreements had a clear connection to what I was struggling with in my own reporting: race and racism were at the center of the debate over what makes a story “objective,” legitimate, or true.
I came across the book Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define America Journalism by journalism scholar David Mindich. His carefully researched history became my guide. I pored over it at night before heading to work as a reporter, and I began to feel connected to a history I could understand. Mindich breaks down the early development of “objectivity” into five aspects that can all be traced to the nineteenth century: detachment, nonpartisanship, “inverted pyramid” writing, facticity, and balance. Mindich, like me, was interested in analyzing the usefulness of objectivity by looking at where it comes from. “It is no less than remarkable,” he writes, “that years after consciousness was complicated by Freud, observation was problematized by Einstein, perspective was challenged by Picasso, writing was deconstructed by Derrida, and ‘objectivity’ was abandoned by practically everyone outside newsrooms, ‘objectivity’ is still the style of journalism that our newspaper articles and broadcast reporters are written in, or against.”
Before the 1830s, most newspapers were either funded by political parties and geared toward white men with voting rights, or they were business journals, geared toward white men who owned businesses, ships, or real estate. But this was a time period when people were arriving in the United States, particularly New York, by the literal boatload. A new kind of industrialism was booming, and a new kind of working class was being born, at least in the North. In the 1830s, a few editors had the idea to try to reach more of this growing audience by creating a new kind of urban publication, a daily newspaper of popular interest that would be sold on the street for a penny. The paper would not be funded by a political party, but instead by advertising sales. Those ads would be valuable to advertisers because of the papers’ high circulation among a growing middle class. So, alongside and in concert with the process of urbanization and industrialization, the penny paper was born—and so was nonpartisan news reporting in the US.
Mindich deals first with detachment and nonpartisanship, explaining that detachment in the 1830s wasn’t what we think of now—there was a lot of hooting and hollering and immoderate language. But Mindich shows that the beginnings of detachment involved a subtle but important shift away from the hands-on approach to partisan politics and toward a new role for newspapers as observers, rather than participants. He also details the emergence of a new style of writing, that impersonal, “inverted pyramid” news writing that starts with the key facts and appears separately from editorial pages. This is still the approach of newswires today: the key information appears at the top of the story—previously, a dispatch about a battle was just as liable to be told in chronological order, beginning with the fighting and ending with who won, what today we would call “burying the lead.” As the 1800s went on, a professionalized role emerged for reporters, who wrote from a stance of naïve empiricism, based on the assumption that facts are observable, and that they are either true or false—what Mindich calls facticity. Finally, he shows that by the turn of the century, journalism in the US also focused on balance, real or performed, sometimes to the detriment of actually uncovering the truth. All this was in service to journalism’s new business model and changing modes of distribution.
Mindich argues that the 1890s was the period when the ideal that would become “objectivity” began to take shape. Alongside this developing notion of objectivity came an increased focus on professionalization and specialized education in the field. And Mindich emphasizes again and again that from the beginning, this increasingly neutral, objective model for news had critics, opponents, and detractors—the people I was looking for. The abolitionist newspaper editor Horace Greeley was one of those critics.
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Horace Greeley was the founding editor of the New York Tribune, one of the first penny papers and one of the most successful media enterprises of the nineteenth century. Greeley was nothing if not a curmudgeon, with a perpetual ax to grind. Round and boisterous, he fits a fabulous stereotype of the early newspaperman: a balding white fellow with an ugly hair-ring and lots of opinions, who bellows at a crew of Oliver Twist–looking paperboys that he dispatches every day in cute hats to sell his papers on the streets of New York. He was also quirky: near the end of his life, he helped start a utopian commune in Colorado and ran for president. He founded a number of publications through the 1830s, creating the New York Tribune in 1841.
In the span of just that decade, purportedly impartial journalism had become something of a movement. His major competitors, including the Sun and the Herald, claimed both neutrality and political independence, and they inaugurated the separation of the news and editorial functions of their papers. But Greeley saw most neutrality claims as pure showmanship. Many of Greeley’s leading competitors did have political affiliations and even political aspirations. (Greeley also accused his competitors of sending their newsboys to flog his newsboys, which, if true, strikes me as a distinctly nineteenth-century problem.)
Greeley despised neutrality, even saw it as insufficiently manly. In his 1868 memoir, Greeley wrote: “My leading idea was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other. I believed there was a happy medium between these extremes—a position from which a journalist might openly and heartily advocate the principles and commend the measures of that party to which his convictions allied him, yet frankly dissent from its course on a particular question, and even denounce its candidates.” Instead of neutrality, he pushed for independence. His paper was openly allied with Whig Party viewpoints but didn’t take funding from political parties and reserved the right to criticize the party as he saw fit. He believed that readers would benefit from knowing where the paper’s editor stood.
In learning about Greeley, I began to see an important distinction that’s often confused in discussions of nonpartisanship in journalism today. “Neutrality” and political independence, two aspects of the larger framework for journalistic objectivity, have not always gone hand in hand. Political independence started as largely a formal distinction: the penny papers weren’t funded by political parties, so their editors and reporters were free to write what they liked and not toe the party line. It functions about the same way today, and most journalistic organizations with integrity pride themselves on the firewall between editorial departments and the people who bring in the money for publications. But as “objectivity” developed, independence and nonpartisanship also became a matter of tone—of presenting oneself as detached and neutral. Greeley pushed the idea that newspaper coverage should be independent-minded but still opinionated.
For Greeley, being an independent but opinionated newspaper editor was a moralistic stance. He was neither a centrist nor a relativist on moral questions. His biggest and most consistent cause was the abolition of slavery, though he also advocated socialism and women’s rights, and opposed divorce, lotteries, and the theater. He hated the “immoral and degrading police reports” and refused to publish something that contained so much explicit violence and vice. In the 1850s and 1860s, his Daily Tribune inveighed passionately against the Confederates and published many works by Karl Marx. An editorial on the front page of his paper around the start of the Civil War began this way: “The war has put some over-nice gentleman in a pretty pickle. These are hard times for Mr. Facing-Both-Ways.” Mr. Facing-Both-Ways—the moderate who refused to pick sides even in the face of civil war—was an enemy of Greeley and all that his paper stood for.
As Mindich shows in Just the Facts, the transition to a more rigid division of news and opinion as a reflection of a paper’s nonpartisanship and detachment was gradual. It happened in fits and starts and was influenced by a great many changes, including the introduction of the telegram and wire services, as well as the growth of interstate train networks, which brought cities closer together. But I was surprised to learn that throughout the nineteenth century, all these ideas still operated separately—like Greeley, you could be politically independent without being neutral. You could also pursue and report empirical facts without being detached from the story. These were particularly important distinctions for Black journalists, who lived in a very different world than white journalists, both before and after the Civil War.
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Far away from Horace Greeley’s exciting New York City mix, a little boy was born in 1856 in Marianna, Florida, whose life provides an excellent example of how complex and contested the territory of “objectivity” has been from the start. When I met this man in books, I felt like I somehow already knew him: T. Thomas Fortune, wavy-haired and intense, was a journalist, poet, and self-identified “agitator” who often became so worked up, he had to take long bike rides to cool his nerves. James Weldon Johnson (who wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing”) remembers visiting friends as a child and rooming in the same house as a grown-up Fortune: “My two playmates and I were sometimes in a room where he sat at a desk writing, covering sheet after sheet that he dropped on the floor, and all the while running his fingers through his long hair. . . . We stood in awe of him.” For me, Fortune represents an opponent of neutrality who was also a fierce advocate of nonpartisanship—and perhaps a model for journalism today.
Fortune developed his ideas about the role of the media through a remarkable life that took him from slavery to a life as one of the most prominent Black editors in New York. When he was born in 1856, Timothy Thomas Fortune’s mother, Sarah Jane, was a house worker, and his father, Emanuel, ran a tannery—both for a white man’s plantation. One of Timothy’s earliest memories, from near the end of the Civil War, is of his mother intervening to defend him from a beating by the plantation’s owner, Mr. Moore. In his autobiography Fortune recalls his wiry, tiny mother, “long hair flying and eyes flashing,” attacking Mr. Moore with her dishrag, and “giving him a rasping tongue-lashing the while for daring to strike her child!” After this incident, Sarah Jane ran off and had to go into hiding for several weeks—and then the war ended, and they were free.
Marianna was a rural, wild place, where Fortune’s family stayed on after Emancipation to farm, fish, and hunt for food. He went to a Freedman’s Bureau school, and his father, Emanuel, became involved in local politics. But attacks on Black people and their white supporters in Jackson County, as well as the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, eventually drove his parents out of Marianna. Timothy himself saw the aftermath of a mass shooting by a white man at a Black picnic. “The ground was littered with dead and maimed children and grown-ups,” he later wrote, and no one was ever charged for it. Under direct threat of violence against Emanuel from hostile white locals, the Fortunes gave up their land and moved to Jacksonville. Teenaged Timothy stayed behind in Tallahassee, where he worked as a page in the state senate. Out of an interest in both politics and writing, he also started to stalk the local newspaper office, the Sentinel, part of his developing obsession with newspapers. He eventually made his way to school at Howard University, but dropped out because he couldn’t afford the tuition.
Fortune was a troublemaker, who placed a premium on telling the truth. “Timothy possessed a very large bump of honesty and it grew larger with his years,” he wrote of himself. Truth-telling was a risky proposition for a young former slave: he was constantly getting into what today might be called “situations.” For example, he described scandalizing a whole town when he first went north to Delaware by booking a room in a hotel that was supposed to be reserved for white people. Because Fortune was light-skinned, it took the hotel management two days to figure out that he wasn’t white; he was promptly given the boot. It seems he narrowly escaped trouble—racist attacks, criminal accusations, a life of lollygagging with beautiful women—a whole bunch of times before he finally moved to New York City, as aspiring writers often do.
At age twenty-five, in 1881, Fortune and some friends launched a paper called the Globe. That paper later became the New York Freeman and then the New York Age, which remained in weekly publication until 1960 and was among the most influential Black papers of the 1800s. Like Greeley’s New York Tribune, Fortune’s paper led with excited editorials, and he used his columns in the Globe and the Age to rail against injustice. The convict leasing system, the plague of lynching, the rampant disenfranchisement of Black people in the South, and the treatment of laborers by corporations all became targets of his clever wrath. Fortune was a fierce critic of segregationists, who at the time were primarily southern Democrats. But he had also seen—and detested—the ways that northern Republican carpetbaggers who came to the South during Reconstruction betrayed the causes of free Black people in favor of their own self-interest. He preferred the term “Afro-American” way before its time.
Among Black people, Fortune was an important voice and intellectual leader, and his paper was read around the country. Even with a segregated audience and a lot of political opponents, there was no question as to whether he was a “real” journalist—which is where I found such a stunning contrast with twenty-first-century views on journalism. The first journalism school was yet to be founded, and the ideas of nonpartisanship and detachment in journalism were still in the process of forming, still not part of any unified school of thought. New York City papers, competing for a rapidly increasing audience, aimed to inform and entertain, interspersing opinion columns with the news.
Black papers and abolitionist journals weren’t the only publications to promote a clear viewpoint. Joseph Pulitzer, who published the popular paper the World, put out a front-page article in 1883 advocating a relatively radical tax reform plan. But perhaps even more than Greeley or Pulitzer, who both flirted with politics and public office, Fortune was always nonpartisan. Political parties can’t be trusted, he wrote in the Globe in 1883. “The Democratic party is a fraud—a narrow-minded, corrupt, bloody fraud; the Republican party had grown to be little better.” He also wrote in 1883 that “to properly defend a people’s interest, a newspaper at this juncture should be non-partisan,” and he constantly inveighed against the Republican Party for letting down Black interests.
For Fortune, nonpartisanship was not so much a path to selling papers as a path to making just demands on behalf of his race. If neither party served them, he wrote again and again, Black voters (and Black writers) should refuse allegiances. Fortune cared about political equality and civil rights for Black people, full stop—so for him, nonpartisanship was a natural stance, and a political one.
T. Thomas Fortune continued writing until his death in 1928, and he was never neutral on his own humanity or on the rights of Black people. By the early 1890s, his paper was so well-known, and Fortune so beloved as an editorial writer, that the Cincinnati Afro-American wrote that if Fortune were white, he’d have been the editor of the New York Times. Perhaps—although its growing conservatism probably wouldn’t have appealed to him (and, worth noting, the New York Times wouldn’t hire its first Black executive editor until more than a hundred years later, in 2014). The New York Times, which was still young and competing to become the city’s paper of record, did turn out to be the enemy of one of Fortune’s closest allies, Ida B. Wells.
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It was 1892, the year Coca-Cola incorporated and the first elevated train opened in Chicago, and paperboys still stood on corners peddling city news for a penny. The country was just coming out of a recession. Ida B. Wells rolled up by train to Jersey City, a growing industrial center with new buildings going up on its riverbanks, to meet with the famous editor T. Thomas Fortune. I imagine Wells, with her dark eyes and petticoats and composure beyond her years (she was twenty-nine at the time), being mildly amused by Fortune, a passionate and pushy man just six years older. They both had been born into slavery in the South, and likely had plenty to talk about, but even more that they probably didn’t feel the need to say aloud.
Fortune had a troubling message for Wells. “Now you are here I am afraid you will have to stay,” he told her. Wells owned a newspaper back home, the Memphis Free Speech, where she’d been running a series of insistent editorials against lynch mobs and lynch law in Tennessee. It turned out Fortune had seen a story cross the AP wire that day, while Wells was traveling, reporting that her office manager had been driven out of town and her printing office destroyed by a white mob. It wasn’t safe for her to go back to Memphis.
Wells hadn’t planned to start an anti-lynching campaign. She was going about her business making a local newspaper when, in March of that year, a white mob lynched three of her acquaintances. The three men were co-owners of the People’s Grocery Company, a relatively new business in town, and they had scuffled with white men associated with the competing store. Things got tense in Memphis, and after a group of Black men shot at a white mob in self-defense, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart were arrested. A few days later, impatient for vengeance, a large group of white men dragged the three men from the jail and killed them. Wells had never been so close to a lynching, and she later wrote about how this incident changed her forever. Before her friends were killed, she’d swallowed the story that Black men were typically lynched for raping white women, a collective crime of passion and pride.
“Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching,” she wrote in her autobiography. Suddenly, things looked different to her: these white men had escalated the conflict with their Black competitors, and then murdered them in cold blood after they defended themselves. “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’”
She started editorializing in the Memphis Free Speech about it, calling for Black people to boycott local white businesses. That enraged the white people who held power in Memphis. “I then began an investigation of every lynching I read about,” she wrote. Wells was intrepid in her investigation of lynchings, their stated reasons, and the actual facts behind them. She read about a lynching in Mississippi, described by the Associated Press: “The big brute was lynched because he had raped the seven-year-old daughter of the sheriff.” But when she went to Tunica County, Mississippi, she learned that the girl was in fact seventeen and had known the lynched man well, and that the circumstances of the accused rape were murky at best. In case after case, she found that the white woman who was purportedly raped hadn’t come forward about the rape accusation until the liaison between her and the Black man in question was made public; in still other cases, she learned that there was no rape accusation or accusation of any crime at all. Wells began to see that the common narrative about lynching was a lie—one even she had believed.
Wells and Fortune must have gotten along fine, because in Jersey City that day, he offered her a job at the Age, and, warned off of returning to Memphis, she stayed in New York to write a series of reports that would later be turned into the powerful anti-lynching pamphlet Southern Horrors. She uncovered the fact that lynching was becoming an epidemic, finding, for example, that 241 people were lynched in 1892 alone.
While Wells crisscrossed the country gathering statistics on lynching, the northern white papers were scarcely covering the problem at all. When they did, there was never an investigation into the allegations against the lynched person, or into the lack of consequences for mob violence. The New York Times reported on lynching from the perspective that, while lynchers ought to be stopped, the penalties for the type of crimes that Black men committed should be more swift and severe. “The crime for which negroes have frequently been lynched [rape], and occasionally been put to death with frightful torture, is a crime to which negroes are particularly prone,” an editorial asserted in 1894. This editorial stance was reflected in the paper’s news coverage. “Black guilt was assumed in nearly every story” about lynching during the 1890s, writes Mindich. The Times managed a semblance of “balance” on lynching without bothering to gather the facts, while Wells, with a clear goal of ending lynching, worked tirelessly to expose facts that might otherwise have never been told.
These facts were published in Fortune’s New York Age, in Wells’s self-published pamphlets, and in speeches she gave around the world. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran its own small crusade not against lynch mobs, but against Ida B. Wells. Wells traveled to Britain in 1894 on a speaking tour, and after some in Britain were moved to start an anti-lynching committee, the Times responded with an editorial calling Wells “a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress, who does not scruple to represent the victims of black brutes in the South as willing victims.” She was painted as a deviant, and I suppose she was. She deviated from a norm that criminalized Black life while decriminalizing white murder, and she encouraged others to organize and agitate. But she was also the journalist who constructed the most thorough picture of lynching in her time, telling a factual story that was nowhere to be found in the pages of white papers.
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Again and again, T. Thomas Fortune was nonpartisan without being neutral; like Horace Greeley, Fortune advocated independence but not passivity. And there was a particular risk for an African American newspaper editor in taking an aggressively nonpartisan stance at the time. Remember, nonpartisanship was still relatively new for newspapers, and party sponsorship remained a relatively common way for papers to pay the bills. This was especially true for Black papers, which frequently depended on Republican support. For white papers, being “independent” might have been part of the recipe for being successful, but that independence typically remained well within the sphere of legitimate controversy, entertaining debates between Republicans and Democrats over policy matters, including policies related to race. But rejecting the white supremacist views of both Republicans and Democrats was well outside the sphere, which meant that T. Thomas Fortune and Ida B. Wells, while using similar reporting tactics as many of their fellow white editors and reporters, played a very different social and political role. For them, telling the truth from a nonpartisan stance also meant pushing back on the status quo. Even as Wells used empirical standards of reporting to tell her story, she didn’t give in to the “gagged, mincing” neutrality Greeley so hated, choosing instead to stand by her conviction that lynching was wrong and must be stopped.
Wells and Fortune called out and exposed lies and injustice, and helped shift the frame for what could be included in mainstream discourse about race. But in a way, journalism in their time was a less conservative, less rigid vocation than it became during the next century. Their heyday in the 1890s was still decades before the terminology of “objectivity” would be consistently applied to journalism, and newspapers, Black and white ones, largely remained a raucous mix of opinion, invective, narrative, and fact. Opinionated editors like Greeley still dominated the front pages of many dailies, the personal voice continually mixing with the reportorial one.
Learning about Ida B. Wells and T. Thomas Fortune, holed up in my Ohio home or watching spring arrive from the screened porch, my loneliness got a little smaller. The conflict that stirred in me as I worried about my own coverage of Black Lives Matter and police violence seemed to be an old conflict. In 1894, using the truth to push back against the criminalization of Black people meant being cast as slanderous, an activist. I began to see that then, as now, feigning a detached neutrality was easy for the people who wanted to sell papers, and impossible for the people whose lives were at stake, whose every word was judged as a representation of their race. But nonpartisanship and editorial independence were not the same as detachment or neutrality, and for these journalists, not being neutral was a path to the truth. The biographies of T. Thomas Fortune the journalist poet and Ida B. Wells the journalist activist rejuvenated me.
As I learned their stories, I also felt aware of my own deviance, my own position outside of the job I was doing every day. I had never known another transgender journalist, first of all, and in many ways, my perspective as transgender puts me in the sphere of deviance, looking from the outside in at contemporary debates over trans issues. It was becoming clear to me that journalists were constantly engaged in demonstrations of detachment and “balance,” without considering that sometimes to be independent isn’t the same as being neutral. To stand independent of white supremacy, for example, might mean actually standing up to it. I began to wonder whether I could live with myself, with my values, and continue in this vocation that I had experienced as a calling, as the work I was meant to do in the world.