My generation, my upbringing, was defined by lies and conspiracy. In the 1990s we had Y2K and Troopergate; in the 2000s, we had truthers and weapons of mass destruction and “Mission Accomplished.” On September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers and AIG went under, an NPR host said, “Remember this day . . . it will go down in history.” It was my younger brother’s twentieth birthday, and I still remember where I was standing, in my kitchen in Chicago. In my neighborhood, condo developments would stand half-built for years while rents skyrocketed. Years later, I would report on how the same investors who’d made a fortune off the crash bought up rental properties en masse across the country, making a fortune off the people who’d lost their homes.
Ten years have passed and I still remember the progress we were promised when Barack Obama was elected, the promise of an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the promise of a post-racial era and a return to socioeconomic progress. None of that has materialized: instead we got government shutdowns, a half-assed health care bill, birtherism, drone strikes. Later we got an election that may have been stolen by Russia and a legislature without the will to find out, a sinister Rudy Giuliani on TV spouting, “Truth isn’t truth.” As I write this, the economy is strong again, but the benefits are being sucked up by the fabulously wealthy, and for the rest of us, nothing is guaranteed—not health care, not retirement, not personal safety, not a safety net. What little social change we made in the last twenty years around gay rights, anti-racism, and the rights of people with disabilities is being chipped away. Trans people are a lightning rod; gender and racial scapegoating is at a new high. No wonder people seek refuge in near-reality, in the Kardashians and Naked and Afraid and President Trump’s tweets.
I’ll admit: I seek refuge in the NPR newscast at the top of every hour—even though, for my whole life, it’s given me a vision of the world that doesn’t align with my own. Still, there’s something comforting in a world that seems fundamentally the same as it did last week, last month, last millennium, something comforting in the distillation of the news of the day into a three-minute clip. My friend Ramona Martinez, who used to be a producer at the NPR newscast, once said that “objectivity is the ideology of the status quo.” On the one hand, as this book has made clear, I can’t stand the status quo: it doesn’t have room for me and my communities, it’s an emperor with no clothes, it’s a mess. But on some days, for me, that status quo can feel like a refuge—it relieves me of responsibility and fear. Let’s just pretend those are clothes on that monarch, that everything is fine. Wildfires and hurricanes, wars and mass shootings, celebrity deaths and congressional stalemates become something easy to digest. The calm voices keep the listener at a distance, and I get to be the listener, a member of the anonymous crowd.
That distance, the sense that we are not implicated, yields a temporary comfort—probably a false one, but this, too, is part of the promise of “objectivity.” If you can stand outside of the world, you can afford not to change it.
Mine is not an argument against the rigorous pursuit of facts, or even an argument that the job of every journalist is to write opinion pieces all day and then protest by night. I love the NPR newscast like a childhood stuffed animal (in an alternative universe, I once fancied myself a less-cool Korva Coleman). I feel sure that there is still a place—a big, important place—for people who seek the truth, who shape and give it meaning. But we have to know what power we have in the shaping.
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At this point, an “objective” approach to news is easy to poke holes in. As we’ve seen, news judgment is never neutral, and movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have shifted the way we think about what’s news for the better. And not affiliating with political parties may be valuable and possible, but not when it’s conflated with impartiality on issues of justice—many Black journalists like T. Thomas Fortune, Ida B. Wells, and Marvel Cooke have stood outside of political affiliation while also speaking out against racism and their own erasure. But because it is so often conflated with the viewpoint of people in power, “objectivity” has been used again and again for gatekeeping, to discourage labor organizing and exclude diverse voices. “Objectivity” also excludes certain people by suggesting that a detached observer is a better one, even as many of the most important stories of our times have been told by people who were close to the issue, not detached outsiders. Finally, “objectivity” has a tendency to objectify, turning people into flattened-out “sources” whose stories are there for the taking, encouraging an extractive approach to journalism in which the journalist is never implicated or accountable.
These are the problems of the practice of so-called objectivity. There is also the more insidious problem of performed “objectivity” and false balance. The need to appear “objective” permeates newsroom culture, especially in mainstream national outlets, often to the detriment of truth and honesty. The attempt to “balance” left with right has often led, in practice, to stifling the voices of people of color, LGBTQ people, and low-income people as well as giving platforms to white supremacists, climate deniers, and transphobes. The right wing in the US has run a campaign to smear the powerless as unruly leftists rather than people speaking up for themselves, and mainstream media outlets have too often given in to this false framing. Performed “objectivity” also often means sidelining women, trans people, and people of color who call for real social change in newsrooms—the fear of being deemed “activist” for standing up for ourselves is very real. This attempt to appear impartial has clearly led to excluding diverse voices from newsrooms over the years. And of course, performed “objectivity” can help journalists avoid bringing an analysis of power and oppression to bear on our own work; looking honestly at power might require us to radically transform how journalism is done.
For me, that transformation can’t come a minute too soon. But if not “objectivity,” what makes journalism trustworthy and good? Even as I expand my ideas about the process of truth-telling and the meaning of balance, I propose hanging on to some basic tenets of traditional journalistic ethics: verification and fact-checking, editorial independence from political parties and corporations, clarity and transparency about financial and political conflicts of interest, and deep, thorough sourcing. I also join a chorus of journalists who have been gradually replacing objectivity with the practice of radical transparency about both our values and our methodologies. Finally, I think defining our values as journalists when journalism is under attack means admitting that we are activists and becoming clear about what we are activists for.
Transparency has also been a focus of ethics in the information age, with good reason: these days, audiences can find out everything about journalists and our stories, even fact-checking or verifying our work on their own. Journalism is exposed from every corner, and this isn’t a bad thing. Journalists make mistakes, and also bias is real. When audiences get information about the reporter’s biases, methodologies, and intentions straight from the reporter or outlet, they can evaluate the trustworthiness themselves. Checking in about, acknowledging, and working within our biases is not the same as doing away with them, or pretending they aren’t there. Transparency can help build trust, letting our audiences in on how we decided what stories to report and how we arrived at our version of the truth.
Of course, the idea that every journalism outlet should be values-based raises up the fear that such a situation will undermine trust in the news media—“objectivity” is still a part of many audiences’ expectation and hope. But the cat is already out of the bag. The information age presents us with more information than any one human, or any one news outlet, or any one algorithm can possibly process. It requires us to bring value systems to bear in evaluating what matters, what’s news, and how stories should be told. Audiences know this but are left with a confounding situation in which everyone claims “objectivity,” but it’s still not clear whom to trust. The least that the news producers can do in this confounding, polarized environment is offer a sense of why and how we report what we do.
Many news organizations already are going further, actively participating in community-based collaboration, media education, and the promotion of curiosity as a part of their news production. And others are also beginning to add another key ingredient for making good journalism that actually reflects the communities we cover: a systemic and ongoing analysis of power and oppression, not just in our reporting but in our assessment of the field of journalism itself.
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I don’t like coming to conclusions, or particularly seeming sure of things. This is one of the traps of putting things in writing: it seems we have come to a stopping point, decided that there is nothing left to consider. The postmodern era has been defined by anxiety over truth claims, reality, and subjectivity, and I share that anxiety. In 2018 Trump henchman Rudy Giuliani made a meme out of the phrase “truth isn’t truth,” and then dug his heels in. In his case, it was a way to avoid the truth (and the law), but the trouble is, he was playing effectively to this shared anxiety. If nothing is entirely true, what does truth matter? While plenty of disciplines have embraced the conundrum, journalism has struggled to catch up; we are still expected to write as if we are sure, to come to conclusions.
More damaging still, journalism is still grieving its lost heroes, looking back at a golden age that never was. Fragmentation in media has made more space for diversity, and the stubborn nostalgia for a more homogeneous era of true “objectivity” has also created an ugly opening, easily exploited by people who actually just don’t like racial, sexual, or gender equity. We need to “go back,” they say, to make journalism great again. We need to purge all these “liberal-bias” identity-politics fake-news journalists—who are often Black or gay or trans or immigrants. In 2018, as I was working on this book, journalist Don Lemon reported that President Donald Trump had privately told him he thought Lemon was unable to be objective about race because he is Black. Meanwhile, Trump and his supporters regularly made public statements against any media critical of him, accusing them of bias and unfairness and calling them “fake news,” railing particularly hard against women and people of color. This kind of talk perfectly exploits both the fear of diversity and the dated attachment to “objectivity” that continue to hold back much of journalism today.
What to do about “alternative facts,” about the bullshit and dishonesty that dominates our political discourse today? The truth is, I don’t know. And one of my deepest beliefs, one of the practices I value the most, is admitting what we don’t know—allowing our minds to swim in the questions, to be submerged. If autocracy and racism and fake news foreclose imagination and colonize doubt, I believe curiosity lies at the center of a framework for resistance that cultivates imagination, that cultivates the skill of living in questions. And when journalists offer this to the world—the attitude of not knowing, and of endlessly seeking to know more—I think we can gain the power to change it. When we foreclose imagination and curiosity, foreclose fierce analysis in favor of feigned objectivity, we sacrifice that power—feeding, instead, into cynicism and indifference. Truth isn’t truth, so what’s the point? This is just the way things are, people say, and then they change the channel, click back to puppy pictures on Facebook.
Journalism without bias is impossible, and our audiences know it. In the postmodern era, and in the internet age, readers and listeners can also always look elsewhere, for a voice they like better, someone they find more honest or identifiable. Rather than making truth impossible, I think accepting the possibility of multiple truths is a positive element of the fight against binary thought and intellectual foreclosure. It doesn’t solve “fake news” or insidious bullshit, but it does give us more narratives and more voices, tools with which to fight back against falsehood.
Kevin Young writes, “What if truth is not an absolute or a relative, but a skill—a muscle, like memory—that collectively we have neglected so much that we have grown measurably weaker at using it?” Maybe what we’re trying to work out here is how to build back up a muscle that has become atrophied in this country: our ability to ask questions. But inquiry is hard to do, humility before the terrible wide world too easy to forget in favor of simplicity. If we understand truth as a skill, it requires us to break down the barriers between journalists and “the public”—to move toward the end of journalism as profession and toward new models driven by collaboration and education. What if exercising our ability to seek out truth, using our muscle of curiosity and questioning, was a job for all of us?
One thing I do know is that we should not succumb to hopelessness in the face of “alternative facts.” Truth matters even when it is multifaceted, prismatic, and strange. If cries of “fake news” lead us to the conclusion that nothing at all can be true, then the game is pretty much over. The winners are the people in power, the people with something to hide.
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Recently I had a dream full of rising water. I was on a ship with my dad and a whole lot of other people, and the ship hit an iceberg. The water was cold and high, and the ship was sinking, like the Titanic. There was a way out, which involved scrambling across the deck of the ship to the bow, jumping onto lifeboats. But as it started to tip and go down, the bow extending upward, lots of people were still caught below deck. There were dozens of children down there, and we knew it. My father and I realized we could save ourselves by following everyone, scrambling and jumping, but instead we headed back down to help. Right as we approached the door to go below the deck, an automated metal gate started to come down. Someone was locking the kids inside the ship to drown. In my dream, my father and I ran toward the gate, wedging our bodies between the gate and the floor and screaming. We tried to hold it open, but we weren’t strong enough. Then I woke up.
We’ve all wondered what we would do in the worst conditions—war, disaster, slavery, prison. Would we be empathic and kind, protective and suspicious? Would we stand up to tyrannical authority or back down, maybe to protect ourselves or our children? Would we protest if it were our children locked in the bottom of the ship? Who would we be, faced with the most limited of choices? Would we stand to the side, looking on as people died? What if it was our job to be a journalist, and that job instructed us to stand to the side?
When the climate changes—politically or otherwise—we come to see ourselves anew. I remember Hurricane Katrina like it was yesterday. I was in Texas in a cheap motel, healing from a surgery when the storm hit. I was pumped up on Percocet, reading Truman Capote and watching the TV news, an unfamiliar treat to me. I remember seeing the newscasters standing waist-deep in the water, the detritus of people’s homes and livelihoods floating by. I watched as one of those newscasters broke down in tears, trying to rattle off the numbers of homes underwater, the numbers of people evacuated, the numbers of dead bodies out there floating, in a disaster that was preventable and human-made. I remember clearly the images that emerged later of President George W. Bush flying over New Orleans in Air Force One, never touching down to see the human suffering. At the motel where I was staying, stranded people showed up from the Gulf Coast for long stays.
I wondered what I would have done if I were caught in that rising water, if it were my job to tell that story? Could I have stood there in the revolting floodwater full of toxins and talked clearly, dispassionately, like Korva Coleman giving the day’s headlines? I imagine myself, the NPR newscaster I’d once hoped to be, standing in the Louisiana humidity, soaked through and telling it straight: It was a Category 5 hurricane. Thousands displaced. Hundreds dead. Here is the temperature. It smells like a dead body. The Dow is up, the S&P 500 is up. Let’s do the numbers: The costs of property damage are in the billions. The levees broke in over fifty places. One thousand eight hundred thirty-three dead, more than a million displaced. A dog’s body is floating by now, next to a torn-off trailer door.
At the time, 2005 was the warmest year on record, but the record keeps being updated. Years later, reporters stopped having to “balance” stories about climate change with climate deniers. I imagine the climate like that rising water, testing our empathy as we grit our teeth and give the news: It’s hotter still this year, and hotter again. We’re hearing reports of flooding and wildfires. We’re hearing reports of drought and displacement. Let’s do the numbers: twenty-five million to one billion people could be displaced by climate change by 2050, one study finds.
How do we balance a story about the sixth extinction, the end of the world? How do we make ourselves human again, after turning the whole world into an object, holding it at a distance, telling its stories without letting our voices crack? If I’m standing in the rising water, am I too close to the story? What does it mean to show vulnerability when you’re the one after the truth, the one gathering the facts?
Stories shape reality and suggest possibility. They can spark curiosity or foreclose it, drowning us in facts and figures. It is possible to make the world new through stories, but it’s also possible to create a world we don’t want. During Hurricane Katrina, a lot of the reporting focused on “looters” and violence, turned away from stories about dozens and then thousands of deaths, dozens and then thousands of people helping each other survive. I imagine myself on the NPR newscast, voice cracking. Nearly two thousand people died here. I’m standing in this water. Hundreds of thousands still displaced. It smells like sewage and death. There is a dog’s body, a trailer door floating past. There’s someone on her way to help; there’s someone on that roof, yelling. What can we do to make this picture different? How can we stop the water rising, hold open the gates so no one is trapped inside? In my little fantasy, my newscaster job doesn’t last long, but it’s okay. I really don’t have time to wait around for the climate to change.