After the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, some journalism organizations decided to go all-in on the notion that it wasn’t enough to present two sides of an issue if one side was clearly misleading or patently false.
It was seen as the end of “objectivity”, the end of “false equivalence”, the end of giving equal time and coverage to, for example, the notion that the moon landing was faked. No more he-said she-said and let the reader decide. We will call a spade a spade if necessary.
Suddenly, many news media were calling out the president on his off-the-cuff pronouncements and random personal attacks, which often had no basis in fact. Some called this the end of objectivity, and many journalists embraced subjectivity and even activism as being more honest since no person can be completely objective.
The scientific side of objectivity
However, Tom Rosenstiel, co-author of an influential journalism text used in many universities, The Elements of Journalism, believes that the drift toward subjectivity and opinion risks eroding the credibility of news media. He believes the tendency springs from a misunderstanding of the concept of “objectivity”. He made his remarks during a keynote address at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin.
In the view of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, described in his book The View from Nowhere, objectivity means exploring facts, data, experience, and data outside of one’s personal experience. In other words, “nowhere” means every place other than the limited experience of the journalist or historian. Objectivity lies not with the individual but with a methodology based an a relentless quest for facts, data, and viewpoints beyond one’s personal experience –“a fully dimensional inquiry”.
NYU Professor Jay Rosen has popularized the notion that “the view from nowhere” is a phony “objectivity”, a false equivalence that gives equal weight to all sides of an argument, Rosenstiel said. Actually, objectivity springs from the discipline of the social sciences, a scientific method based on testing theories with evidence, not from relying on a person to be “objective”.
Kathleen McElroy, director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, commented that mainstream media organizations would not have been surprised by Trump’s election victory if they had been following the discipline of objectivity as “fully dimensional inquiry”. They relied too much on their own limited information circles and networks to assume Hillary Clinton would win. Black and minority leaders in swing states saw Trump’s victory coming, but they weren’t consulted by the mainstream media, McElroy said.
Rosenstiel said just collecting facts isn’t enough. We have to provide context and verify the facts. “I stand for the professional discipline we believe in: this skeptical way of knowing the world, this passion to learn and inform, which distinguishes us from propagandists and political advocates whose primary aim is to persuade, this is what will save us”, he said.
“But if we abandon that common purpose or replace a misguided understanding of objectivity by taking refuge in subjectivity and thinking our opinion has more moral integrity than genuine inquiry, then I fear we will be lost”.