Moving Beyond Objectivity Won't Increase Trust in Newsrooms
A response to a particular dumb iteration of an already dumb argument
It’s rare for me to read an article so bad that I feel the need to bash it, but Leonard Downie Jr.’s opinion article titled ‘Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust’ in The Washington Post (a newspaper at which Downie was once executive editor) is such a piece.
On the one hand, the piece is part of a long list of articles proclaiming that objectivity’s time has come, and that rather than taking it round back and putting it out of its misery, old yeller style, we need to execute it publicly, to show it is a thing of the past.
This terribly trite argument typically goes something like this: ‘perfect objectivity is actually impossible; therefore we shouldn’t use it as a standard’. This argument is incredibly dumb and I feel second-hand embarrassment for those making it, particularly those who aren’t in a freshman seminar. Just because we cannot achieve the platonic form of objectivity, does not mean it should be jettisoned as a goal. When making a frisbee we aim to make it as round as possible, even if there is no such thing as an existing perfect circle. We don’t go ‘oh no, we’ll never make a frisbee that’s perfectly circular, better just make frisbees triangular’. That would be really stupid.
Another persistent issue in this genre is that they seem to misunderstand what objectivity would entail. Downie’s article quotes Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press, saying “It’s objective by whose standard? … That standard seems to be White, educated, fairly wealthy.” If a paper’s coverage is distorted by the mores of their staff or readers, that’s not objectivity, it’s the complete opposite. In the objectivity has to go pieces, objectivity is often presumed to be responsible for all sorts of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, when by definition these biases are a departure from objectivity.
Downie’s article has drawn my derision for two reasons. First of all, it’s very poorly written. It takes him just two sentences to reach the ‘Webster’s dictionary defines’ cliché, aptly dubbed by Community as the Jim Belushi of openings, besting the CBC, who took three sentences before landing on the cliché.
The second is that the title promises something that the article fails to deliver. It claims that newsrooms that move beyond objectivity can build trust, a thing which newsrooms need to function and yet find themselves historically lacking. One has to presume that when the title was given to this piece, whether by Downie or his editor, they meant trust amongst regular people. And yet, the process that led Downie to the revelation that to produce trustworthy news, one has to move beyond objectivity was to “[interview] more than 75 news leaders, journalists and other experts in mainstream print, broadcast and digital news media, many of whom also advocate such a change.”
Instead of talking to, I don’t know, the regular people whose trust newsrooms need to win back, this person just talked to a bunch of his colleagues, some of whom he admits are advocates for the policy.
The word ‘trustworthiness’ is only mentioned twice in the article (trust does not appear at all outside the title), and in neither instance do they bother to explain exactly how trust is built between readers and journalists. Building trust involves straightforwardness, but more than anything, it involves getting things right. And, recently, there are some pretty big examples of mainstream news organisations getting things pretty fucking wrong. There is far too much worry about “history’s judgement” in a vague moral sense, and not enough about history’s judgement in a concrete, factual sense.
What’s ironic is that so many of objectivities supposed sins are in fact not objectivity. We are told by critics of objectivity “that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘bothsidesism’ in covering stories”, but the criticism of false balance only applies when it is false, i.e. not objective.
Perhaps the dumbest part of the article comes when Downie admits to having written an entire article condemning a standard he doesn’t understand
Throughout the time, beginning in 1984, when I worked as Bradlee’s managing editor and then, from 1991 to 2008, succeeded him as executive editor, I never understood what “objectivity” meant. I didn’t consider it a standard for our newsroom. My goals for our journalism were instead accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth.
Proclaiming that you don’t understand the thing you believe should be eschewed is a pretty explicit violation of the principle of Chesterton’s Fence, which holds that we should not remove a fence, lest one understands its purpose.
Journalistic norms of objectivity exist precisely in order to build trust in their audiences. Suggesting people would trust in a newsroom which openly casts off objectivity is ridiculous.