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FAIRLY UNBALANCED: HOW OBJECTIVITY KILLS NEWS
by Chris Hedges
Pacific Free Press
http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/5513- fairly-unbalanced-how-objectivity-kills-news.html
Monday, 01 February 2010 19:25
The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News
Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to
newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by
the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader.
The creed of objectivity and balance, formulated at the beginning of
the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from
advertisers, disarms and cripples the press.
Original yellow journalist, William Randolph Hearst
And the creed of objectivity becomes a convenient and profitable
vehicle to avoid confronting unpleasant truths or angering a power
structure on which news organizations depend for access and profits.
This creed transforms reporters into neutral observers or voyeurs. It
banishes empathy, passion and a quest for justice. Reporters are
permitted to watch but not to feel or to speak in their own voices.
They function as "professionals" and see themselves as dispassionate
and disinterested social scientists.
This vaunted lack of bias, enforced by bloodless hierarchies of
bureaucrats, is the disease of American journalism.
[For complete article reference links, please see source at Truthdig
here.]
"The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is
report what both sides say and you've done a fine job of objective
journalism debilitates the press," the late columnist Molly Ivins
once wrote. "There is no such thing as objectivity, and the truth,
that slippery little bugger, has the oddest habit of being way to hell
off on one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between
any two opposing points of view. The smug complacency of much of the
press-I have heard many an editor say, 'Well, we're being attacked
by both sides so we must be right'-stems from the curious notion
that if you get a quote from both sides, preferably in an official
position, you've done the job. In the first place, most stories aren't
two-sided, they're 17-sided at least. In the second place, it's of
no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying,
'Cat,' and the other side saying 'Dog,' while the truth is there's
an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes."
Ivins went on to write that "the press's most serious failures are
not its sins of commission, but its sins of omission-the stories we
miss, the stories we don't see, the stories that don't hold press
conferences, the stories that don't come from 'reliable sources.' "
This abject moral failing has left the growing numbers of Americans
shunted aside by our corporate state without a voice. It has also,
with the rise of a ruthless American oligarchy, left the traditional
press on the wrong side of our growing class divide. The elitism,
distrust and lack of credibility of the press-and here I speak of the
dwindling institutions that attempt to report news-come directly from
this steady and willful disintegration of the media's moral core.
This moral void has been effectively exploited by the 24-hour cable
news shows and trash talk radio programs. The failure of the fact-based
press to express empathy or outrage for our growing underclass
has permitted the disastrous rise of "faith-based" reporting. The
bloodless and soulless journalism of the traditional media has
bolstered the popularity of partisan outlets that present a view
of the world that often has no relation to the real, but responds
very effectively to the emotional needs of viewers. Fox News is,
in some sense, no more objective than The New York Times, but there
is one crucial and vital difference. Fox News and most of the other
cable outlets do not feel constrained by verifiable facts. Within the
traditional news establishment, facts may have been self-selected or
skillfully stage-managed by public relations specialists, but what
was not verifiable was not publishable.
The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of
objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based
on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to
be objective, and promise a return to "genuine" objectivity. Fox's
Bill O'Reilly argues, "If Fox News is a conservative channel-and I'm
going to use the word 'if'-so what? ... You've got 50 other media that
are blatantly left. Now, I don't think Fox is a conservative channel.
I think it's a traditional channel. There's a difference. We are
willing to hear points of view that you'll never hear on ABC, CBS
or NBC."
O'Reilly is not wrong in suggesting that the objectivity of the
traditional media has an inherent political bias. But it is a bias
that caters to the power elite and it is a bias that is confined
by fact. The traditional quest for "objectivity" is, as James
Carey wrote, also based on an ethnocentric conceit: "It pretended
to discover Universal Truth, to proclaim Universal Laws, and to
describe a Universal Man. Upon inspection it appeared, however,
that its Universal Man resembled a type found around Cambridge,
Massachusetts, or Cambridge, England; its Universal Laws resembled
those felt to be useful by Congress and Parliament; and its Universal
Truth bore English and American accents."
Objectivity creates the formula of quoting Establishment specialists
or experts within the narrow confines of the power elite who debate
policy nuance like medieval theologians. As long as one viewpoint is
balanced by another, usually no more than what Sigmund Freud would
term "the narcissism of minor difference," the job of a reporter is
deemed complete. But this is more often a way to obscure rather than
expose truth.
Reporting, while it is presented to the public as neutral, objective
and unbiased, is always highly interpretive. It is defined by rigid
stylistic parameters. I have written, like most other reporters,
hundreds of news stories. Reporters begin with a collection of facts,
statements, positions and anecdotes and then select those that create
the "balance" permitted by the formula of daily journalism. The closer
reporters get to official sources, for example those covering Wall
Street, Congress, the White House or the State Department, the more
constraints they endure. When reporting depends heavily on access
it becomes very difficult to challenge those who grant or deny that
access. This craven desire for access has turned huge sections of the
Washington press, along with most business reporters, into courtiers.
The need to be included in press briefings and background interviews
with government or business officials, as well as the desire for
leaks and early access to official documents, obliterates journalistic
autonomy.
"Record the fury of a Palestinian whose land has been taken from him
by Israeli settlers-but always refer to Israel's 'security needs' and
its 'war on terror,' " Robert Fisk writes. "If Americans are accused
of 'torture', call it 'abuse'. If Israel assassinates a Palestinian,
call it a 'targeted killing'. If Armenians lament their Holocaust of
1,500,000 souls in 1915, remind readers that Turkey denies this all
too real and fully documented genocide. If Iraq has become a hell on
earth for its people, recall how awful Saddam was. If a dictator is
on our side, call him a 'strongman'. If he's our enemy, call him a
tyrant, or part of the 'axis of evil'. And above all else, use the
word 'terrorist.' Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror,
terror. Seven days a week."
"Ask 'how' and 'who'-but not 'why'," Fisk adds. "Source everything
to officials: 'American officials', 'intelligence officials',
'official sources', anonymous policemen or army officers. And if
these institutions charged with our protection abuse their power,
then remind readers and listeners and viewers of the dangerous age
in which we now live, the age of terror-which means that we must live
in the Age of the Warrior, someone whose business and profession and
vocation and mere existence is to destroy our enemies."
"In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on
television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must
be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest
boon to humanity since pasteurized milk," the former New York Times
columnist Russell Baker wrote. "Real objectivity would require not
only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate,
but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow
publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work
or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you
another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won't work?
We give you another who says they will. The public may not learn much
about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another
excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity.
In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told
what the score is."
Journalists, because of their training and distaste for shattering
their own exalted notion of themselves, lack the inclination and
vocabulary to discuss ethics. They will, when pressed, mumble
something about telling the truth and serving the public. They
prefer not to face the fact that my truth is not your truth. News
is a signal, a "blip," an alarm that something is happening beyond
our small circle of existence, as Walter Lippmann noted in his book
"Public Opinion." Journalism does not point us toward truth since,
as Lippmann understood, there is always a vast divide between truth
and news. Ethical questions open journalism to the nebulous world of
interpretation and philosophy, and for this reason journalists flee
from ethical inquiry like a herd of frightened sheep.
Journalists, while they like to promote the image of themselves as
fierce individualists, are in the end another species of corporate
employees. They claim as their clients an amorphous public. They seek
their moral justification in the service of this nameless, faceless
mass and speak little about the vast influence of the power elite to
shape and determine reporting. Does a public even exist in a society as
fragmented and divided as ours? Or is the public, as Walter Lippmann
wrote, now so deeply uninformed and divorced from the inner workings
of power and diplomacy as to make it a clean slate on which our armies
of skilled propagandists can, often through the press, leave a message?
The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked
for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter
how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite
became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the
power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. The press became,
as seen in the Iraq war and the aftermath of the financial upheavals,
a class of courtiers. The press, which has always written and spoken
from presuppositions and principles that reflect the elite consensus,
now peddles a consensus that is flagrantly artificial. Our elite
oversaw the dismantling of the country's manufacturing base and the
betrayal of the working class with the passage of the North American
Free Trade Agreement and the press dutifully trumpeted this as a form
of growth. Our elite deregulated the banking industry, leading to
nationwide bank collapses, and the press extolled the value of the
free market. Our elite corrupted the levers of power to advance the
interests of corporations and the press naively conflated freedom
with the free market. This reporting may have been "objective" and
"impartial" but it defied common sense. The harsh reality of shuttered
former steel-producing towns and growing human misery should have,
in the hands of any good cop reporter, exposed the fantasies. But the
press long ago stopped thinking and lost nearly all its moral autonomy.
Real reporting, grounded in a commitment to justice and empathy, could
have informed and empowered the public as we underwent a corporate coup
d'etat in slow motion. It could have stimulated a radical debate about
structures, laws, privilege, power and justice. But the traditional
press, by clinging to an outdated etiquette designed to serve corrupt
power structures, lost its social function.
Corporations, which once made many of these news outlets very rich,
have turned to more effective forms of advertising. Profits have
plummeted. And yet these press courtiers, lost in the fantasy of their
own righteousness and moral probity, cling to the hollow morality of
"objectivity" with comic ferocity.
The world will not be a better place when these fact-based news
organizations die. We will be propelled into a culture where facts
and opinions will be interchangeable, where lies will become true,
and where fantasy will be peddled as news. I will lament the loss
of traditional news. It will unmoor us from reality. The tragedy is
that the moral void of the news business contributed as much to its
own annihilation as the protofascists who feed on its carcass.
by Chris Hedges
Pacific Free Press
http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/5513- fairly-unbalanced-how-objectivity-kills-news.html
Monday, 01 February 2010 19:25
The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News
Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to
newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by
the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader.
The creed of objectivity and balance, formulated at the beginning of
the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from
advertisers, disarms and cripples the press.
Original yellow journalist, William Randolph Hearst
And the creed of objectivity becomes a convenient and profitable
vehicle to avoid confronting unpleasant truths or angering a power
structure on which news organizations depend for access and profits.
This creed transforms reporters into neutral observers or voyeurs. It
banishes empathy, passion and a quest for justice. Reporters are
permitted to watch but not to feel or to speak in their own voices.
They function as "professionals" and see themselves as dispassionate
and disinterested social scientists.
This vaunted lack of bias, enforced by bloodless hierarchies of
bureaucrats, is the disease of American journalism.
[For complete article reference links, please see source at Truthdig
here.]
"The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is
report what both sides say and you've done a fine job of objective
journalism debilitates the press," the late columnist Molly Ivins
once wrote. "There is no such thing as objectivity, and the truth,
that slippery little bugger, has the oddest habit of being way to hell
off on one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between
any two opposing points of view. The smug complacency of much of the
press-I have heard many an editor say, 'Well, we're being attacked
by both sides so we must be right'-stems from the curious notion
that if you get a quote from both sides, preferably in an official
position, you've done the job. In the first place, most stories aren't
two-sided, they're 17-sided at least. In the second place, it's of
no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying,
'Cat,' and the other side saying 'Dog,' while the truth is there's
an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes."
Ivins went on to write that "the press's most serious failures are
not its sins of commission, but its sins of omission-the stories we
miss, the stories we don't see, the stories that don't hold press
conferences, the stories that don't come from 'reliable sources.' "
This abject moral failing has left the growing numbers of Americans
shunted aside by our corporate state without a voice. It has also,
with the rise of a ruthless American oligarchy, left the traditional
press on the wrong side of our growing class divide. The elitism,
distrust and lack of credibility of the press-and here I speak of the
dwindling institutions that attempt to report news-come directly from
this steady and willful disintegration of the media's moral core.
This moral void has been effectively exploited by the 24-hour cable
news shows and trash talk radio programs. The failure of the fact-based
press to express empathy or outrage for our growing underclass
has permitted the disastrous rise of "faith-based" reporting. The
bloodless and soulless journalism of the traditional media has
bolstered the popularity of partisan outlets that present a view
of the world that often has no relation to the real, but responds
very effectively to the emotional needs of viewers. Fox News is,
in some sense, no more objective than The New York Times, but there
is one crucial and vital difference. Fox News and most of the other
cable outlets do not feel constrained by verifiable facts. Within the
traditional news establishment, facts may have been self-selected or
skillfully stage-managed by public relations specialists, but what
was not verifiable was not publishable.
The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of
objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based
on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to
be objective, and promise a return to "genuine" objectivity. Fox's
Bill O'Reilly argues, "If Fox News is a conservative channel-and I'm
going to use the word 'if'-so what? ... You've got 50 other media that
are blatantly left. Now, I don't think Fox is a conservative channel.
I think it's a traditional channel. There's a difference. We are
willing to hear points of view that you'll never hear on ABC, CBS
or NBC."
O'Reilly is not wrong in suggesting that the objectivity of the
traditional media has an inherent political bias. But it is a bias
that caters to the power elite and it is a bias that is confined
by fact. The traditional quest for "objectivity" is, as James
Carey wrote, also based on an ethnocentric conceit: "It pretended
to discover Universal Truth, to proclaim Universal Laws, and to
describe a Universal Man. Upon inspection it appeared, however,
that its Universal Man resembled a type found around Cambridge,
Massachusetts, or Cambridge, England; its Universal Laws resembled
those felt to be useful by Congress and Parliament; and its Universal
Truth bore English and American accents."
Objectivity creates the formula of quoting Establishment specialists
or experts within the narrow confines of the power elite who debate
policy nuance like medieval theologians. As long as one viewpoint is
balanced by another, usually no more than what Sigmund Freud would
term "the narcissism of minor difference," the job of a reporter is
deemed complete. But this is more often a way to obscure rather than
expose truth.
Reporting, while it is presented to the public as neutral, objective
and unbiased, is always highly interpretive. It is defined by rigid
stylistic parameters. I have written, like most other reporters,
hundreds of news stories. Reporters begin with a collection of facts,
statements, positions and anecdotes and then select those that create
the "balance" permitted by the formula of daily journalism. The closer
reporters get to official sources, for example those covering Wall
Street, Congress, the White House or the State Department, the more
constraints they endure. When reporting depends heavily on access
it becomes very difficult to challenge those who grant or deny that
access. This craven desire for access has turned huge sections of the
Washington press, along with most business reporters, into courtiers.
The need to be included in press briefings and background interviews
with government or business officials, as well as the desire for
leaks and early access to official documents, obliterates journalistic
autonomy.
"Record the fury of a Palestinian whose land has been taken from him
by Israeli settlers-but always refer to Israel's 'security needs' and
its 'war on terror,' " Robert Fisk writes. "If Americans are accused
of 'torture', call it 'abuse'. If Israel assassinates a Palestinian,
call it a 'targeted killing'. If Armenians lament their Holocaust of
1,500,000 souls in 1915, remind readers that Turkey denies this all
too real and fully documented genocide. If Iraq has become a hell on
earth for its people, recall how awful Saddam was. If a dictator is
on our side, call him a 'strongman'. If he's our enemy, call him a
tyrant, or part of the 'axis of evil'. And above all else, use the
word 'terrorist.' Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror,
terror. Seven days a week."
"Ask 'how' and 'who'-but not 'why'," Fisk adds. "Source everything
to officials: 'American officials', 'intelligence officials',
'official sources', anonymous policemen or army officers. And if
these institutions charged with our protection abuse their power,
then remind readers and listeners and viewers of the dangerous age
in which we now live, the age of terror-which means that we must live
in the Age of the Warrior, someone whose business and profession and
vocation and mere existence is to destroy our enemies."
"In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on
television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must
be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest
boon to humanity since pasteurized milk," the former New York Times
columnist Russell Baker wrote. "Real objectivity would require not
only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate,
but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow
publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work
or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you
another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won't work?
We give you another who says they will. The public may not learn much
about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another
excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity.
In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told
what the score is."
Journalists, because of their training and distaste for shattering
their own exalted notion of themselves, lack the inclination and
vocabulary to discuss ethics. They will, when pressed, mumble
something about telling the truth and serving the public. They
prefer not to face the fact that my truth is not your truth. News
is a signal, a "blip," an alarm that something is happening beyond
our small circle of existence, as Walter Lippmann noted in his book
"Public Opinion." Journalism does not point us toward truth since,
as Lippmann understood, there is always a vast divide between truth
and news. Ethical questions open journalism to the nebulous world of
interpretation and philosophy, and for this reason journalists flee
from ethical inquiry like a herd of frightened sheep.
Journalists, while they like to promote the image of themselves as
fierce individualists, are in the end another species of corporate
employees. They claim as their clients an amorphous public. They seek
their moral justification in the service of this nameless, faceless
mass and speak little about the vast influence of the power elite to
shape and determine reporting. Does a public even exist in a society as
fragmented and divided as ours? Or is the public, as Walter Lippmann
wrote, now so deeply uninformed and divorced from the inner workings
of power and diplomacy as to make it a clean slate on which our armies
of skilled propagandists can, often through the press, leave a message?
The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked
for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter
how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite
became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the
power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. The press became,
as seen in the Iraq war and the aftermath of the financial upheavals,
a class of courtiers. The press, which has always written and spoken
from presuppositions and principles that reflect the elite consensus,
now peddles a consensus that is flagrantly artificial. Our elite
oversaw the dismantling of the country's manufacturing base and the
betrayal of the working class with the passage of the North American
Free Trade Agreement and the press dutifully trumpeted this as a form
of growth. Our elite deregulated the banking industry, leading to
nationwide bank collapses, and the press extolled the value of the
free market. Our elite corrupted the levers of power to advance the
interests of corporations and the press naively conflated freedom
with the free market. This reporting may have been "objective" and
"impartial" but it defied common sense. The harsh reality of shuttered
former steel-producing towns and growing human misery should have,
in the hands of any good cop reporter, exposed the fantasies. But the
press long ago stopped thinking and lost nearly all its moral autonomy.
Real reporting, grounded in a commitment to justice and empathy, could
have informed and empowered the public as we underwent a corporate coup
d'etat in slow motion. It could have stimulated a radical debate about
structures, laws, privilege, power and justice. But the traditional
press, by clinging to an outdated etiquette designed to serve corrupt
power structures, lost its social function.
Corporations, which once made many of these news outlets very rich,
have turned to more effective forms of advertising. Profits have
plummeted. And yet these press courtiers, lost in the fantasy of their
own righteousness and moral probity, cling to the hollow morality of
"objectivity" with comic ferocity.
The world will not be a better place when these fact-based news
organizations die. We will be propelled into a culture where facts
and opinions will be interchangeable, where lies will become true,
and where fantasy will be peddled as news. I will lament the loss
of traditional news. It will unmoor us from reality. The tragedy is
that the moral void of the news business contributed as much to its
own annihilation as the protofascists who feed on its carcass.