User:Holobowj/Sandbox

User:Holobowj/Sandbox

Objectivity and Journalism

Objectivity is often described as one of the key characteristic of journalism ethics. Beginning in the 1920s, objectivity represented a method of journalism that promoted truth and accuracy in reporting, without any personal biases, necessary in a country hounded by the yellow journalism, and a lack of credibility. Soon, objectivity came to be "the backbone of American Journalism, [where a] biased journalist is not a journalist, but a propagandist..." and where working newspapers set some of the highest journalism standards in the world.

Originated by Walter Lippmann as a way to professionalize journalism, objectivity is a journalistic process used to liken the act of reporting to that of producing a scientific experiment. Today, objectivity more loosely defines an end goal, an accurate product free of bias and opinion. Because of the difficulty involved in preparing such a piece, objectivity is now frequently regarded as a professional goal rather than a standard. Objectivity is a principle to strive for, but not necessarily to achieve all the time.

Objectivity originally stemmed from media's opinion that they represent the "people's right to know," and the Hutchins Commission's call for greater "social responsibility" in press practices. It was generally believed that the public benefited most from journalism that fully and accurately provided the daily news, while also representing society's constituent groups fairly, being open to comment and criticism and providing clarification when needed. By using journalism free of any "slant" or opinion, bias, or falsity, papers are able to demonstrate that "[t]he socially responsible view of the press underscores the common citizen's right to enough information to make educated decisions in a democratic society."

The debate over journalistic objectivity today stems from whether or not journalism free of any opinion is really advantageous to the public. It is often found that audiences look to their papers to disseminate the information for them, and to guide them towards educated, meaningful input. Because of this, "transparency" is sometimes lauded over objectivity in contemporary journalism. However, caution must be taken as opinion can unknowingly cause distortion of truth, providing the public with pre-slanted views, a "direct malfeasance" of the trade.

History and Definition

There is still debate on when objectivity was first considered a standard to be followed in journalism. While some historians argue that the ideals behind objectivity, such as impartial and unbiased reporting, began to form as early as the 1820s, others argue that it wasn't until Walter Lippmann championed formalizing journalism by having it adopt the scientific standard of objectivity in the 1920s that the form really came into practice.

Unbiased and impartial journalism first came into popularity with the early Penny Presses in the 1920s and 1930s as newspapers sought wider audiences. Penny Presses abandoned the party paper style, in which publishers sought to sway their audiences' beliefs using argumentative rhetoric; instead, the new press adopted an informational model that emphasized the public's right to know the facts. As the trend continued, the public began to demand more balanced news reporting, considering papers without a political bias to be more trustworthy as bias came to imply "a journalistic failure to fulfill the information role" of a paper.

However, with the reportage of facts came the sensationalizing of disreputable stories, and Penny Presses began to sell news in a tabloid style, The turn of the twentieth century marked a greater push for higher standards of respectability and credibility from papers aiming to legitimize journalism as a profession. In an attempt to liken journalism to law or medicine, journalism took on a codified set of standards, laid out by numerous journalism associations that began to form by the 1920s. Among these codes, the factors that encompass objectivity became prevalent as a standard to which journalists and editors should be held accountable. In 1922, with the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Canons of Journalism, the first national code of journalism ethics was born, setting out to mark the importance of reporting facts, with substantive data and attributed interviews, independently of opinions. Typically, a code of ethics regarding objectivity can be defined by George Lardner Jr.'s description of the practices of procedural objectivity:

1. The reporter may relate, on his own authority, only the observable facts of an overt event - that is, what he can see and verify - immediate sense of knowledge;
2. The reporter should relate what is controversial by stating the views of the parties controverting one another. This usually represents an attempt to give the "why" of an event while restricting the reporter to a narration of what is for him simply more sense knowledge, that is, what he heard the parties say about the controversy;
3. The reporter must be impartial in the gathering and the writing of both the observable facts and the opposing viewpoints. He must not let his own beliefs, principles, inclinations or even his own knowledge color the raw, overt material or the statements covering it.

Likening journalism to science again, objectivity came to represent a procedure to be followed in order to produce the best possible results when reporting. Walter Lippmann helmed the push for the ideal objective news, represented by a product separate from the reporter, wherein they are considered to be passive observers rather than participants in the action. It was believed that after the investigative excess of muckraking, the propagandizing of war news, and the sensationalism of yellow journalism, objectivity was to deliver a trustworthy news to the public by following a prescribed formula that was set out to provide stories with:

• balance, by finding the "other side" of the story;
• supporting evidence, through use of official documents, speeches and interviews;
• cited evidence, lending accountability and responsibility for the claims made;
• organization, through a top-down model that presented all the important facts (who, what, where, when, why) first, and expanded the story later.

Today, journalistic objectivity can be defined as "unbiased accurate reporting of verifiable facts with detachment and completeness in a manner that is fair, balanced, through and clearly separate from the reporter's views and opinions," and has come to represent an ideal, if impractical, standard to which journalists should aspire. Because of objectivity's nature of completely unbiased reporting, it is generally considered to be an impossible standard, and has in the recent past fallen from favor in reporting. However, objectivity has become one of the defining factors of American journalism, setting one of the highest standards of reporting unbiased accuracy in the world, and it is still enshrined in American journalism, where the argument is that just "because an ideal is just beyond your grasp, do you stop trying to reach toward it?"

As a defense against Libel

Because of its strict nature of fact gathering and balanced reporting, objectivity can also protect publishers in libel defense. While in many countries Libel Chill, which discourages media outlets from reporting on stories for fear of lawsuits, is a serious threat to the freedom of the press, there are also countries that are protecting this freedom by offering greater defenses for publications.

Canada

In Canada, newspapers have qualified privilege when reporting on facts that both they and the public deem important. However, even with this protection, newspapers in in Canada can suffer from libel chill, undermining the freedom of the press. Luckily, recent Supreme Court decisions have taken steps to provide newspaper publishers with greater defenses in libel cases when they can provide proof of responsible journalism. The decisions in the cases of Grant v. Torstar Corp. and Quan v. Cusson set up the outlines of the new public interest responsible communication defence, wherein publishers can defend their case so long as they can provide proof that the matter is of public interest and that the publication was responsible and diligent in attempting to verify the facts presented in their paper. By this standard, it is possible to see how objective reporting, which requires fact checking and balanced expert input, helps to defend publications from new lawsuits. By creating an environment where responsible, objective reporting is necessary in the workroom, newspapers are able to simultaneously protect themselves from libel accusations and expand the number of stories which can be included in the scope of public interest.

Challenges

Objectivity v. Advocacy

One of the most important limitations when considering journalistic objectivity is that it takes away journalists' ability to advocate causes they deem important. Because of the structure of objective reporting, journalists cannot write on any subject they choose, but must wait until an event occurs that makes that subject newsworthy. These events - known as newspegs - mean that journalists are limited by only being able to report what others want them to report. Even if there is a newspeg to hang a story on, objectivity limits the interaction a journalist can then have with that subject; a journalist who has followed a story for months can likely be considered an expert on the subject, but they are only allowed to produce balanced and unbiased articles, hiding their opinions and the "truth behind the facts" that might otherwise provide insight to the reader.

Objectivity v. Partisanship

In America, there is a trend towards returning to partisan, niche-market news. For instance, Fox News channel openly caters to conservative news to bodies across the country, a "niche" that makes up roughly 50% of the population. While frowned upon in an objective environment, partisan media has the ability to elevate political engagement with the public, and some of the media with the strongest viewpoints are among the fastest growing news outlets, such as alternative, ethnic and online media. Objectivity is limited by its broad perspective. It is a belief that an informed public will be able to make its own opinions based off of the facts objectivity can deliver. Targeted as a "marketplace of ideas", objectivity provides the public with access to a mass of information which the "rational individual" can use to form an opinion. However, the popularity of partisan media suggests that audiences are becoming impatient with objectivity, that the balanced view points with no real advancement beyond he said/she said should be discarded and news outlets should take a more active stance.

Objectivity v. Transparency

As objectivity is defined by its distance from a topic, it is limited by its very structure. As Overholser says, “it often produces a report bound in rigid orthodoxy, a deplorably narrow product of conventional thinking,” this line of thought has provided journalists with an argument against objectivity, opting instead for transparency and openness in the reporting process As the public interacts more and more with the news, through comment sections and other sources of online media, news articles are now made of both the input of journalist who write and the readers who comment. Dialogical discourse is taking place around news media in a way that questions its validity and demands more than expert dissemination of news. Instead, the press might return to a conversational model of journalism, as proposed by Carey, wherein the press would abandon its expert format (the transmission model) and enter into a partnership with its audience, as a member of the current culture, reaffirming reader beliefs by starting a conversation with it rather than a distanced observer of it.

Journalism professor Jane Singer of the University of Iowa suggest that newspapers adopt transparency as a new professional standard in order to open the news room up and be able to compete with the immediacy of online news. She points out that "new relationships with audiences are prompting journalists to see their own ethical standards as a more definitive distinguishing characteristic and a greater source of ongoing value than, say, the ability to write well... or to gain access to sources (who can be found readily enough online)" By having traditional news outlets adopt transparency as a practice, journalists who were once credible because of their objectivity could continue to maintain their ethical standards and be held accountable for their reporting by letting audiences in on the various stages of the process.

Trust in Objectivity

Additionally, as objective reporting relies on strictly the facts, it seems the public's acceptance of these facts as truth is coming into question when PEW research has found that public distrust in news sources has reached a twenty year high, reporting that "Fully 66% [of those polled] say news stories often are inaccurate, 77% think that news organizations tend to favor one side, and 80% say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations."

Objectivity Online

Traditional Journalism v. Blogging

While some online news reporting does use objectivity as a standard, the broad nature of the medium ensures that there are many other viewpoints competing with truth and fairness in the online news marketplace. Because much of the journalism online is done independently through weblogs (blogs), the people who write these blogs face fewer constraints in choosing what to write and how than traditional journalists might. These writers, many of whom consider themselves citizen journalists, usually have little to no formal training, and therefor do not always conform to traditional journalism standards, placing value in their independence over norms such as objectivity, balance, thoroughness and fairness. Whereas traditional journalists must rely on the standards of fair and balanced reporting, setting themselves up as observers of the action, online bloggers have the freedom to interpret the information, deciphering how news will affect their communities and readers, and then interacting with those readers through comment and chat sections. Blogs can also help traditional journalism by creating newspegs for objective reporting, as happens when online communities spark wide-spread conversation regarding subjects that mainstream media would have passed over. For instance, as Paul Andrews remembers:

late last year [2002] a Weblogger picked up Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's comments about Strom Thurmond from a C-Span broadcast and ignited an online firestorm that, in turn, prompted mainstream news organizations to become involved in reporting the story. Online information sharing has pressured the Bush administration into several retractions and has even led to key resignations, as in the case of Richard Perle's resignation as chairman of the Defense Policy Board and the State of the Union retraction concerning African-supplied uranium to Iraq.

Weblogs, by following up and relying on stories that are usually first published by traditional media , are thought to rely on their community for truth and accuracy, or as Wilson Lowrey, from the University of Alabama, puts it, "that rigorous reporting and accuracy by individual bloggers is not crucial because the web of other bloggers acts as a safety net for errors" Rather than using objectivity as a source of accountability and credibility, many internet sources gain their audience's trust by opening up to them about themselves, about where they got their information and with links to sources where readers can find more related articles. This openness of sharing new sources is referred to as transparency , and has become increasingly common in tradition media as well, where many publications now work within open work rooms, revealing news gathering techniques and processes that allow the public to interact with the story and ask questions about the material and its validity. In blogs, this technique is evident in the way that the writer and reader equally interact with a story, co-producing a product in real time, rather than the collection and dissemination of a final product as you see in print journalism.

One news sources that seems to blend the ideals of transparency and objectivity is Wikinews, a division of the Wikimedia project that relies on user-based input to produce collaborative reporting based on traditional norms. On this site, registered users can report on events they feel have not attained enough mainstream media coverage, be they local, national or international, and are asked to maintain a neutral point of view throughout by collectively editing articles to remove forms of bias. The neutral point of view policy (NPOV) on the website is "absolute and non-negotiable", and while Wikinews does not advocate for objectivity, the NPOV policy dictates "that one should write articles without bias, representing all views fairly," while elaborating "that an article should fairly represent all sides in a news story, and not make an article state, imply, or insinuate that any one side is correct," The neutral point of view policy (NPOV) on the website is "absolute and non-negotiable" a description shared by the objectivity ideal.