When Did "Objective" Displace "Fair" In Journalism?
Moving to the Right: Brit Hume's Path Took Him From Liberal Outsider to The Low-Key Voice of Conservatism on Fox News (Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, via Brothers Judd)
Hume is no partisan brawler in the mold of some of Fox's high-decibel hosts. By virtue of his investigative background, his understated style and his management role, he represents a hybrid strain: conservatives who believe in news, not bloviation, but news that passes through a different lens, filtered through a different set of assumptions.
On April 6, when every network newscast led with the revelation that President Bush had authorized former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak classified information about Iraq, Hume began his program with an apology by Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney for a physical altercation with a Capitol police officer a week earlier. Bush and the CIA leak was Hume's third story.
"Sure, I'm a conservative, no doubt about it," Hume says. "But I would ask people to look at the work." He does not accuse his fellow journalists of pursuing a partisan agenda, saying their bias is "unconscious."
The discussion of issues among the panelists on Hume's Special Report is some of the best on television.
Orrin Judd had a great observation about this story:
[T]here's something deeply odd about the host of a program on a rival liberal cable network writing about the potential conservative bent of Mr. Hume, no?
Yes.
Alex Whitlock has a post up about a recent New York Times story. The point he makes is related to Hume's "unconscious" point:
If it is so natural to scoff when things are tilted one way or another for some reason or another (financial incentive, relationships, etc), why do liberals look at us so funny when we say that a newsroom that 85% Democrat liberal is almost unavoidably going to be biased? Perhaps it's partly because some conservatives paint it up as a conspiracy -- I mostly chalk it up to being human. The solution, the author says, is to avoid whatever incentives make us biased. But how does a newsroom move towards ideological diversity when there aren't as many conservatives interested in being journalists?
Of course, the journalists in those newsrooms that may tilt 85-90% Democrat still insist that they are "objective" -- and that's part of the problem. Not only does a certain amount of groupthink prevail in those newsrooms, but the journalists actually think they're objective on top of it! As a case in point, the Chronicle's self-appointed online editorial page linker recently noted that he likes a certain far-left blogger because the blogger is not a "raver" -- this despite that blogger's regular references to President Bush's "lies" and the need to impeach him! That's not raving, one supposes, when one's own view is decidedly left of center. But is it really objective? No, it's not. That doesn't make the self-appointed editorial page linker part of any conspiracy. It just reflects the lack of self-awareness and self-criticism (myopia?) that prevails in the profession.
My friend Ethan has long criticized that notion of "objectivity" as the mantra of professional journalists, and I'm more inclined to his view these days. Yes, if professional journalists continue to insist that's their standard, then it's really easy to demonstrate that they consistently fail to live up to that standard. But that gets boring after a while (too easy!). Still, news organizations are left with the problem of how to boost ideological diversity in the newsroom while still clinging to the notion that their newsrooms are "objective." That one's not so easy.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 04/19/06 20:35 | Media Matters | Technorati
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Comments
I dunno Kevin. Your thinking seems rather...fringy.
Posted by anne @ 09:25 on 04/20/06
No joke, Anne. It's surprising that we can think in complete sentences, frothing at the mouth as we are.
Posted by R. Alex @ 20:38 on 04/20/06
I've spent the better part of eight years believing quite firmly that the notion of full objectivity is nothing short of a chimera. It doesn't exist. It is totally incoherent. That's partly why I really don't give damn about the biases of any news outlet one way or the other.
FoxNews' advertising slogan when it began was "fair and balanced." Um, sure. There is no such thing as objectivity, IMO.
Posted by TP @ 23:37 on 04/20/06
There is no such thing as objectivity, IMO.
I haven't gone that far, but I don't think journalists are convincing when they proclaim their objectivity, for all the reasons that have been discussed to death. Nonetheless, if they're going to proclaim that they are objective, they really should be prepared for demonstrations to the contrary.
I think a better goal is probably fairness. And to go a little Straussian -- if you're going to cover various sides of an issue, or break things down into the tedious Republican/Democrat tit for tat, at least try to cover both "sides" of an issue as those sides understand themselves. And just maybe, every once in a while, break out of the Republican/Democrat "sides" dichotomy in coverage of issues.
I really am curious when this insistence on "objective" displaced a concern with "fair" in journalism.
Posted by Kevin @ 07:48 on 04/21/06
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