In Defense of Journalistic Objectivity
Two recent incidents remind us that the old style journalism rules that so many people criticize had some merit
It is trendy these days to criticize journalistic objectivity. For decades, the prevailing wisdom, especially in newspaper publishing, was to air a variety of different views, to report on “both sides” of a controversy, and to strictly separate reporting and editorializing, with the latter going on the op-ed page and staying out of the news stories.
People don’t like this, for a number of reasons. One of the more reasonable and substantive critiques is that it can lead to false balance: e.g., especially on an issue like global warming, where one side of a debate is clearly full of it. This critique often gets translated into snark, i.e., you wouldn’t air “both sides” of a “debate” about the Holocaust, but the underlying critique has some merit.
But there’s also a lot of what media critic Eric Alterman used to call “working the refs”: people who actually just want the media to advance their political goals and who dislike when the media does not do so.
The key thing to understand, however, is that the ideal of objectivity is eroding and being replaced with a more activist ideal of newsgathering that used to be associated with more ideological publications like Mother Jones or Fox News, where reporters infuse their reporting with their own opinions and conceptions of what is good. Media organizations have relaxed longstanding rules against reporters participating in protests (rules that served to protect reporters by ensuring that they did not get mistaken for participants who might be violating the law or police orders and arrested). Certain viewpoints have been declared “beyond the pale”, and not just on uncontroversial things like the Holocaust, but on contentious issues of the day such as riot suppression and whether the coronavirus pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
But two things have happened this week that serve to remind us that, even if the ideal was never fully realized, the notion of a press that tries to objectively report and to air multiple sides without itself taking sides was in fact a pretty good approach for the media to take.
The first involved a sports story. Sports is notable because it was always something of an exception to the rule of objective reporting. Of course, sports editors would deny this, but there have always been homer sportswriters and sports columnists who openly root for the teams they cover (usually local teams) and write pieces from that perspective. But Bill Plaschke, one of the highest paid newspaper sports columnists in the business and a person who has covered baseball for decades, showed the folly of this approach.
Here’s the situation: the Dodgers (Plaschke’s local team) and Braves are playing a seven game playoff series. The odds in such a series are against any team that loses the first two games. In over 100 years of baseball postseasons, they have only come back 14 times.
The Dodgers got down 2-0. They then won the third game. They were still down 2-1, and still needed to win 3 more games while holding the Braves to 0 or 1 win to win the series. It’s still daunting. And the way they won the third game was very lucky: they were getting slaughtered most of the game, before Cody Bellinger hit a very fortunate 3 run homer late in the game.
But Plaschke wrote a column that basically argued that the series was now over, and a Dodgers comeback was guaranteed, because they won the third game. This, of course, is quite obviously what a Dodgers fan would think, but it is not journalism. Plaschke was not reporting on any actual reality, and in fact, the Dodgers got shelled 9-2 in game 4 and now trail the series 3 games to 1.
You may dismiss this as just cheerleading in the sports pages, not really important to readers anyway, and perhaps this is true, except this is also reflected in how the news media is covering the Biden reconciliation bill. Here are two typical pieces, by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post. Both of them analyze the prospects from the bill from a stance where liberal politicians and activists who are pushing the bill are clearly in the right and will surely triumph with their brilliant political strategies over the desires of more skeptical Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Which is, I guess, one way of looking at the matter….
But it isn’t reality. The reality is that while a bill may eventually pass, liberals pushing it have engaged in massive amounts of what Matt Yglesias used to call “green lanternism”, the assumption that if you just have enough will you can do anything. (The Green Lantern, a comic book superhero, operated pursuant to that principle.) They assumed that they would just roll over Manchin and Sinema, but that is clearly not true.
Well, so what? The liberals had a political strategy, and it was wrong. This is no different than a million other political failures by both parties, whether it is FDR’s court packing, Hillarycare, or Bush’s scheme to attach personal accounts to Social Security. But the media coverage is different this time. Instead of simply and dispassionately analyzing and reporting whether Biden has the votes (which would have disclosed months ago that he was going to need to make massive legislative compromises), so much coverage has started from the assumption that Biden’s presidency stands or falls on the passage of this bill and that the liberals’ strategy for passing it was brilliant and would lead to inevitable success. And I don’t mean to pick on Greg Sargent specifically; his coverage is no different than what we have seen from numerous media outlets.
In other words, the media is making the same mistake on the reconciliation bill that Bill Plaschke makes when covering the Dodgers, only the reconciliation bill is actually important in a way that the result of a sporting event is not.
What would better coverage had looked like? Well, first of all, as I said above, it would have acknowledged the obstacles early on. It might have also reported on why the liberals and Biden chose the strategies they did. Obama, for instance, famously bought off Joe Lieberman by stripping the public option early on in the Obamacare process. Why didn’t Biden do that with Manchin and Sinema? Did liberals pressure him not to do so? Are some liberals, indeed, less interested in passing a bill than they are in shaming Manchin and Sinema?
It also would have contextualized the importance of this bill to Biden’s presidency. There’s a lot of overblown claims about how Biden cannot be reelected unless this passes. I have even seen political scientists who ought to know better make this claim. But the historical evidence is to the contrary. While teams don’t usually come back from 2-0 deficits in 7 game series, Presidents do win reelection after failing to get stuff through Congress. Court packing’s unpopularity did not hurt FDR in the polls, and Clinton won reelection after failing to get his health care plan or his stimulus bill passed. Non cheerleading reporters, instead of accepting the claims of party activists at face value, might have looked this up and reported the truth, that while the reconciliation bill could be substantively good for the American public, it did not necessarily determine Biden’s reelection prospects.
And most importantly, as it has become more and more clear that Sinema and Manchin are preventing the bill from going through, it would have reported on and evaluated Biden’s and the liberals’ strategic choices, instead of going back and forth between assuring readers of the brilliance of the strategy of rolling over Sinema and Manchin, and blaming Sinema and Manchin alone for their perfidy and treachery. (I don’t need to tell you that now, a day after saying the Dodgers had it in the bag, Plaschke has now dropped his pom poms and completely given up on his team.)
I think one of the things that is sometimes missed in discussions of media biases is a simple one: it’s less fun to be objective. Journalists, after all, have opinions, and they have egos. Big ones. They often got fine educations and have upper class backgrounds. It is no fun to have to take a public persona where everyone out there knows more than you do and you have no control or influence over events. It’s a lot more gratifying to actually go out there and state your own opinions. Plaschke has a lot more fun rooting for the Dodgers in print than he would if he were hemmed in and had to report objectively. He gets to be a fan. But readers can be fans themselves; what they need from the press is to tell them, straight, what’s going on. The much-derided norm of “objectivity” disciplines journalists and pushes them towards doing that.
*SIGH* You reach an incorrect conclusion.
These aren't arguments for Hearst-like "objectivity". "Objectivity" was a phony invented by Hearst as an excuse for having newspaper monopolies. Everyone was terrified at the propaganda potential of having only one newspaper in town, and "objectivity" was Hearst's excuse for why it would be OK. It was not OK. The writers were not objective; they just concealed their bias under a cloud of writing style. "We report, you decide" is always a lie, and it's used by Fox News to spread propaganda, even.
These incidents are, rather, arguments for the British-style press. The British-style press, which we also had in the US prior to Hearst, has the following principles:
-- the writer's opinion is crystal clear, obvious, and their spin on the facts is probably about as partisan as you can get. So you can discount it. You *know* this is a Dodgers fan or a Biden fan.
-- but the writers never, ever, ever, ever, ever lie about or omit facts.
-- and there are a lot of different press outlets with *different attitudes*.
In short, there is a duty to present all the evidence accurately, and then you know what spin each newspaper will put on it because they wear their bias on their sleeve. So you can check a different newspaper for a different spin.
I will typically read stories about the same event in the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, and the Telegraph -- and WOW, the spin is different! The Guardian is trashing the Tories, the FT is trashing Boris but not the other Tories, the Telegraph is trashing Labour, the Independent is trashing everyone -- but the facts in the article are all exactly the same.
They all include the same points, even though they put different emphasis; the Guardian mentions the points which favor the Tories (while trying to dismiss or explain them away), the Telegraph mentions the points which favor Labour (while trying to dismiss or explain them away).
This is healthy journalism. Since you are used to an *adversarial* court system, perhaps you will see why it's healthy. Each side (and there are more than two!) pitches its case and submits its evidence but everyone must work from the same evidence.
The only place I see this alive and healthy in the US traditional media is in New York City, where the NY Post (right-wing) and the NY Daily News (left-wing) can both report on some incident involving the police -- and the spin is wildly different but the facts are the same in both articles. The NY Post is making excuses for what looks like police abusing people. The NY Daily News is giving the most charitable interpretation to the actions of the person arrested. But they both have the same *facts*.
But NYC was never subject to the Hearst monopoly.
The examples you gave departed from the second principle I gave for British-style journalism: never, ever lie about or omit the facts. If there's no evidence that the bill matters to Biden's reelection but the cheerleading writer really wants it to... they write "Historically, whether Presidents pass such bills does not seem to matter to their re-election, as shown by X, Y, Z. Nevertheless, this case might be different because blah blah blah."
That's the sort of thing you see in the British press. It's good.