Media Objectivity

Overview

"Media objectivity" refers to the nearly century-old assumption that the media most directly responsible for providing wide public access to news should maintain a careful and deliberate neutrality in the presentation of that information. The world is perceived through the vehicle of mass media. Whatever the vehicle—whether print journalism, broadcast news, radio, Internet sites, or social media platforms—and whatever the subject, mass media, it is assumed, aim to pursue and report facts, information without slant and/or individual perspective. Indeed, within the functions of a free speech culture, media objectivity has long been deemed essential to an informed and aware public. "In any democracy, public opinion has a strong influence on decision-making process. So, individuals and decision-makers need to be well informed about … public issues" (Kumar, 2016). Much like scientists committed to painstaking observation and in turn the careful recording of such data without judgment or opinion, journalists, whether covering wars or political campaigns, sports or entertainment, business or the sciences, are expected to carefully separate news from their own opinions, the facts from their value system, and in turn through the careful objective presentation of the news to allow the media consumers themselves—readers, or viewers, and/or listeners—to reach their own conclusions. By digging up the facts, by shaping them into a clear narrative, by carefully validating facts as accurate, journalists maintain media objectivity that theoretically would be critical in shaping an informed and aware public.

In practice, however, there is some question as to whether objectivity in reporting news is even possible. The idea that those responsible for covering events can shut down their own sensibilities, personal experiences, emotions, opinions, and biases seems dubious. Media scholars suggest that such depersonalization, were it possible, would inevitably have its own hazards. Since the 1970s and the advent of cable television programming with its plethora of news channels and then less than a decade later the explosion of information platforms on the Internet, mass media theoreticians have begun to reconsider the theory of media objectivity and have started to not only shape a different concept of media objectivity but also to revisit traditional perceptions about the value of media objectivity and to ask whether objectivity is even a worthwhile goal.

In the fractious political and cultural environment of America in the 2020s, it has become a common complaint that news reporting, whatever the media, is hopelessly, terminally biased; that the media has lost even the semblance of fairness and balance. There is much hand-wringing over the state of mass media and the impact of such blatant subjectivity in the reporting of events, what Sobieraj, Berry & Connors termed "outrage-based programming" (2013). Whatever the subject—global warming, terrorism, immigration reform, gun violence, electioneering fraud, scandals, crime and punishment, or business and financial activities—some media news reporters routinely insert opinions during segments; candidly express emotional reactions; carefully select and even distort data; quote specialists out of context; use theatrical gestures, grimaces, and even voice inflection to signal a desired response; and indulge unscripted editorializing as part of covering news events.

Reporters and news anchors represent media outlets that in turn are driven by narrow and particular interests: One network may push conservative politics, while a call-in radio station in the same market is dedicated to social justice broadcasting. The plethora of news platforms that have proliferated in the digital age in response to both the ubiquity of mobile devices and the incessant demand for fresh news around the clock have posed severe challenges for those who advocate and expect media objectivity. Cable news outlets accuse each other of entrenched and obvious bias, and indeed, in the "age of Trump" such bias became overt. Radio call-in shows offer a virtually unlimited flood of opinions from both the host and the callers, views unsubstantiated by evidence and uncomplicated by any hard data. Images are easily modified and framed for effect. Internet websites casually select which facts to front and, without expectation of documenting any assertions, can create out of deliberate subjectivity the illusion of objectivity for mass consumption simply by offering stories that confirm preconceived ideas.

If such media subjectivity can encourage healthy activism and involvement in public affairs, it can as well enflame hatemongering, racism, bigotry, division, unchecked and (mass media theorists worry) uncheckable. As Eric Alterman, historian and media theorist, argued even before Donald Trump became a viable political figure, "Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment—in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war" (2010). In an era where telling the difference between "fake" news and hard news has become problematic, where news commentators frequently speculate about the implications of news rather than merely report the news, when political interests drive media broadcasts, mass media scholars bewail the loss of media objectivity. Truth is lost, media executives are now driven more by ratings and advertiser dollars than by any commitment to objectivity.

In such an era when media reporting itself is seen as "inaccurate, commercialized, sensualist and biased" (White, 2000), mass media specialists celebrated as heroic the all but lost concept of media objectivity. That concept dated to the 1920s. A passionate coterie of American journalist-expatriates in Europe (led by iconic political news commentator Walter Lippman and practiced most famously by a young war reporter from Kansas City named Ernest Hemingway) witnessed with alarm how tyrannical governments routinely used the media to distort the coverage of events as a way to control a population's perceptions of the government. Journalists as a community and as a profession pledged to present news without such bias.

The commitment to unblinking realism and to objectivity shaped the print and radio coverage of World War II. This heroic sense of media objectivity would be embodied in the first generation of television news broadcasters during the 1950s and the 1960s, most prominently the towering figures of Edward R. Murrow and supremely Walter Cronkite, who together made CBS television news the standard for accurate and hardnosed objectivity, but exemplified as well by NBC's Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and later by Tom Brokaw and John Chancellor. Cronkite's iconic sign-off line summarized the nearly century-long imperative of media objectivity: "And that's the way it is."

In assessing what appears to be the loss of such journalistic ideals, mass media scholars of the new millennium have begun to revisit those assumptions and have come to far different conclusions. Indeed, those moments when Murrow and later Cronkite most profoundly engaged their wide television audiences were exactly those moments when they acknowledged their humanity, revealed emotion, drew from their own biases and judgment, and manifested in turn the sorrow or outrage, pride or admiration that any person might. Murrow movingly described the terrified civilians huddled in air raid shelters beneath the streets of London during the Nazi blitzkrieg. A decade later, he displayed his sense of outrage and decried the House Un-American Activities hearings being conducted live on television by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cronkite teared up in the moments after John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead and again when he delivered reports from the corpse-strewn battlefields of Vietnam and baldly asked the purpose. The sober, grandfatherly Cronkite's voice choked with pride when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. These were moments, as Stourton argued in Cronkite's obituary in 2009, of clear and evident subjectivity, powerful, unforgettable moments that would shape a generation and become the nation's defining moments.

Thus, those looking into the apparent loss of media objectivity that began within the highly charged political and cultural climate that defined the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990s and reached its most toxic expression during Trump's 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential campaigns, have begun to rethink the traditional assumptions about media objectivity and to redefine the relationship between events and analysis, that between reporting verifiable facts and airing and in turn defending ideas and/or opinions. Within the mass media communications environment of the twenty-first century, expectations that media ought to be somehow objective is, in the end, too simplistic. As Lee Drutman argued in a controversial 2018 piece in The New Republic, when trying to decipher the slippery notion of truth versus reality during Trump's presidency, media objectivity became unconscionable nostalgia.

Issues

The question then is whether mass media outlets, whatever the format, should forsake objectivity as a goal and use the bully pulpit of the mass media to advocate causes and attempt to convert or rally their audience. Data indicates that nearly 70 percent of Americans who regularly watch mass media news expect, even assume a bias (Morris, 2007). Mass media theorists, however, caution that such deliberate and upfront slanting of the news is little more than propaganda that entirely loses sight of the value and reliability of reportage. Indeed, blatant subjectivity is masked as objectivity and balance. In an attempt to mediate these extremes, mass media theorists have redefined media objectivity by centering the concept around three interrelated elements: 1) balanced investigation; 2) informed assessment; and ultimately 3) impartial presentation.

The actual presentation of the news whether in print, on television, online represents only the end-result of a reporter's investigative process. Long before the reporter begins the public and very visible work of delivering the news, that same reporter has used a variety of journalistic strategies behind the scenes to gather significant data relevant to the story—not simply relevant to a perspective or bias. Investigation cannot be selective, whatever the bias of the media outlet itself. Media objectivity is thus measured by the due diligence that goes into preparing a news piece. For example, a militant pro-environmental website in a Western state wants to investigate charges of industrial runoff dumping into the groundwater near a major city. The bias of the website is clear—they advocate responsible stewardship of the environment and are publicly dedicated to exposing violations of state guidelines. However, to maintain objectivity, the website would be obligated to investigate all sides of the controversy, to cover not just the environmental impact but to gather specific data on what is being dumped, interviewing relevant expert scientific and environmental testimony, as well as talking with local business leaders, neighborhoods, civic organizations, and politicians. This process is time-consuming and expensive, but balanced investigation is a critical element of media objectivity in the digital age.

Balanced investigation is not sufficient—after all, investigation of relevant sides can still lead to the selective presentation of that data, called "cherry picking," that helps push a particular agenda or bias. Thus, media objectivity can only be realized if the assessment of the gathered data is as transparent as it is informed. The media outlet is responsible for evaluating the material that will go into a story. If the assessment of the information—its reliability, its relevancy, its significance; its timeliness—is guided not by the tunnel vision of subjectivity, the presentation of the report will reflect objectivity.

Ultimately it is the actual presentation of the information that most determines media objectivity. Whatever the media, how information is presented, mass media theorists argue, creates the appearance of objectivity. Media offers a range of ways to impact the presentation and to create a slant and sustain a bias. For instance, media outlets routinely make decisions about which stories are presented in what order—relegating a story that undercuts media bias to a dead time slot creates subjectivity. Decisions about how to cut and shape a news piece, how much of a quote to use and what gets elided, and which experts should be presented are all strategies for shaping audience opinion despite the appearance of objectivity. Even the delivery of the report can create bias—facial features, eye rolling, shoulder shrugging, smirks, exasperated looks, shaking heads or nodding, and feigning boredom all are ways to create bias.

In print, other strategies apply: decisions about what information is relegated to dependent positions within a sentence; word choice; the use of pejorative adjectives and adverbs; the use of subtle rhetorical devices such as irony, hyperbole, loaded rhetorical questions, understatement, all can shape subjectivity. Thus, balanced and impartial delivery of the information is ultimately most helpful and direct way to create media objectivity—by maintaining a civil tone; by offering opposition arguments without intrusion or condescension; by reporting not with inflammatory adjectives, manipulated images, and unsubstantiated accusations but rather by reliable data; and by offering conclusions that are based on a balanced investigation and an impartial assessment of a wide range of evidence, data, and expert testimony. That presentation, in turn, informs the news consumer and encourages, in turn, a balanced and responsible approach to even the most divisive subjects. Those three steps—balanced investigation, informed assessment, and impartial presentation—represent the new theoretical model for media objectivity in the digital era.

Bibliography

Alterman, E. (2010). Journalism's age of shame. Nation, 291(7/8), 10. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=53030480&site=ehost-live

Budak, C., Goel, S., & Rao, J. M. (2016). Fair and balanced? Quantifying media bias through crowdsourced content analysis. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80,250–271. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=114678728&site=ehost-live

Canella, G. (2023). Journalistic power: Constructing the 'truth' and the economics of objectivity. Journalism Practice, 17(2), 209-225. DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2021.1914708

Drutman, L. (2018). Learning to trust again. New Republic, 249(3), 4–6. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=127863272&site=ehost-live

Headlee, C. (2021, Sept. 7). Seeking objectivity in journalism is getting in the way of speaking truth. Current. current.org/2021/09/seeking-objectivity-in-journalism-is-getting-in-the-way-of-speaking-truth/?wallit‗nosession=1

Kumar, N. P. (2016). Journalistic objectivity in media risk debate: Challenges & opportunities. The Clarion 5 (1), 91–97. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=117180429&site=ehost-live

Morris, J. (2007). Slanted objectivity: Perceived media bias, cable news exposure, and political attitudes. Social Science Quarterly, 88(3), 707–728. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=25617385&site=ehost-live

Sobieraj, S., Berry, J., & Connors, A. (2013). Outrageous political opinion and political anxiety in the US. Poetics, 41(5), 407–432. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=90094421&site=ehost-live

White, P. (2000). Media objectivity and rhetoric of news story structure. In E. Ventola (Ed.), Discord and Community: Doing Functional Linguistics (pp. 379–392). Tubinger, Germany: Laupp & Gobel.