When I was in j-school back in the Dark Ages, we heard a lot about "objective journalism." The theory was that reporters and editors had an obligation to keep their opinions to themselves and simply report facts.
So, if you were covering a school board meeting, you used the agenda of the meeting as a guide, figured out which topics were either most crucial or most controversial and led with those. You added quotes from various players to explain or describe the events of the meeting.
Except for the occasional spontaneous protest or unfortunate gaffe, these stories are informative but not terribly exciting. But they are objective.
Now, suppose, your editor tells you that they want you to write a story. Not just ask some questions and interview various players. The editor tells you what they want the story to say.
I had this happen to me once. One of our leading museums had decided to charge admission for an upcoming (and very popular) exhibition. This was not done at the time. The powers that be (at least including my editor) didn't like the decision and wanted to "drop a bag of shit," as my editor so eloquently put it, on the museum's doorstep.
I interviewed the museum curator, who told me that bringing such exhibits to town was very expensive, requiring very high insurance, and that this was why they were charging. I accepted this logic.
I then interviewed the curators of the other local museums to see if they were planning to charge for traveling exhibits (they said no). Then I wrote my story. My objective story, which quoted the curator explaining the costs of insuring very famous artworks. Then I turned it in.
My editor didn't like the story.
"Look, we want this story to lambast the museum for charging for this exhibit," he explained. "The museum has a big endowment. They shouldn't be charging people."
I told him that other museums (including in Dallas) charged admission for special exhibits, and that the curator had said we might not get certain exhibits if the museum couldn't charge.
"Look, if you don't want to write the story, we'll just give it to somebody else who will," he responded.
I'm ashamed to say, I rewrote my story to give them the angle they wanted. It was my one and only front page headline in a major newspaper. What I learned from that experience was that journalists talk a lot about fairness, objectivity, standing up for the "little guy," informing the public, and "holding politicians accountable," but, in the end, they are, all too often, more about getting results they want as opposed to telling the truth.
So, it's ok to trash a museum curator for bringing major art exhibits to your city if he crosses your imaginary line of "fairness." Pay no attention to whether patrons think the practice is acceptable. It's your opinion that is important. Because you are the press.
I thought about this while reading The myth of objectivity at Echidne's site.
When I was a working journalist, a few newsroom critics accused me of pushing a feminist agenda.
They were right.
My agenda was to improve conditions for women inside our newsroom and coverage of women inside our pages. But opponents saw a feminist agenda as more subversive – a breach in their belief that journalists must be objective.
They were right about that, too, but didn’t realize they were not objective, either. They thought that being a feminist made me biased. It didn’t occur to them that not being a feminist was also a political stance. No one is neutral. You challenge the system, or you support it, even if it’s just with your silence and inaction.
This is an old debate in j-school: objectivity versus "advocacy" journalism. People who don't want to rein in their opinions argue that it is impossible for us to be objective in writing and still tell the truth.
Maybe you can't always be objective. Or maybe you shouldn't always be objective. But there are places for opinions and it isn't in news stories.
As my experience shows, there are lots of ways to express opinion and bias in reporting. There's leaving out inconvenient facts. There's not quoting people who won't say what you want. There's running multiple stories from one angle to show a "trend." There's treating presidential candidates differently in the press. There's fact checking one candidate and not the other. But in the end, none of this gives the public the information they need to make their own decisions. But it might advance a journalist's agenda.
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