‘Objectivity’ doesn’t exist in news: Let’s stop pretending it does
There’s been a push in the media lately to shed or alter longstanding news practices for a post-Trump and post-pandemic world. CNN’s Brian Stelter recently released an article that detailed how different players involved in the COVID-19 news cycle viewed how media handled key moments in the pandemic. Stelter ended the analysis with a criticism of Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams for saying that “all sides” put politics over science during the COVID-19 response, a move that Selter rightly called “a cop-out.”
However, while it’s easy to criticize what media and politicians did wrong. it’s much harder to explain what the media in particular should have done, and what it should do going forward. Headlines have certainly changed since Trump took office and as the pandemic carried on longer than most thought it would. Before not too long ago, it would be nearly unheard of for news headlines to call the president a liar, as New York Times did with its 2017 front-page opinion “Trump’s Lies, a Definitive List,” and even more recently, CNN’s Nov. 2020 article, “Fox News' Maria Bartiromo gave Trump his first TV interview since the election. It was filled with lies.”
While New York Time was criticized for its headline in 2017, now, a simple search of “Trump news” on any web browser now shows a myriad of headlines with some combination of the words, “Trump,” “lies,” “false” and “wrong.” Such headlines were once taboo, but now they’re increasingly becoming the norm. As such, there’s been an ever-growing discourse over whether these headlines are pushing reporters in the right direction, one that corrects propagandistic messaging and decries “fake news” politicians spew out at pressers.
Related to this problem is the fact that media has long held the word of authorities as gospel truth and “thou shalt report objectively” as its golden rule. Thomas Nagel said in 1986 that reporters should take “the view from nowhere,” but 1986 America no longer exists. Journalists are now reporting in an increasingly pluralistic society, one that is much more compound and complex than it was in 1986. Politics and culture are no longer dominated by white males, and as America changes, perhaps journalism should, too.
At a click of a button, anyone, including the president, can send out a message full of misinformation designed to hurt and confuse. Twitter, Facebook and livestreams didn’t exist in 1986. The culture of 24-hour news cycles and breaking news didn’t exist in the capacity they do today. All these advancements, if you chose to call them such, have altered how we disseminate and consume information. Likewise, the news must decide if it’s still socially responsible to pretend reporters have the view from nowhere, or whether it’s time to admit that the “objective” view of the past was, more often than not, determined by the white male’s perspective of the world.
With this shift in America’s political and cultural has come an attack on the media both internally and externally. Alt-right organizations favored by the outgoing president, such as Fox News, as well as a slew of even more obscure online fringes, have emerged and become many Americans’ only source of news. NPR’s Nov. 30 article “Newsmax Rises On Wave Of Resentment Toward Media — Especially Fox News” even said these outlets are trying to “outfox Fox News.” As more mainstream outlets are decried as “fake news” by those who wish to get their news from Russian trolls and disgruntled out-of-work white guys living in their parents’ basement, the question must be asked: How will mainstream, legitimate media regain the moral high ground?
We do so by remembering that context matters a whole lot, especially when the guy running the country thinks facts are debatable and opinions are as good as gold. We don’t try to provide a “counter point of view” to things that any human with the ability to sit upright should recognize as truth— things like climate change’s existence, the Earth is round, and that COVID-19 isn’t a hoax made up to implant tracking devices into every American. We need to call conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories; racism, racism; sexism, sexism; and propaganda, propaganda.
Trying to be “objective” by giving counter points of view too often gives a platform for disinformation and confusion. Media arguably should have always been providing context to pressers and questioning authority, but that’s especially crucial to the democratic process now that misinformation is so much easier to spread and so embedded into our social media feeds and daily lives. If we want an enlightened democracy, we need an enlightened media that’s willing to shed past procedures that heralded an objectivity that never existed and instead embraces its roles as a fact checker, context provider and demagoguery destroyer.
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This opinion was originally written for a class at Medill.
