Here’s a portion of a comment I wrote on my Giuliana Sgrena article. I was so impressed with my reasoning, I decided to make it it’s own post! (I edited myself, slightly).
The mainstream press certainly has plenty of flaws, and there sure is some dishonest reporting out there. But I think American journalism is more honest than it’s ever been. Guys like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair have been around forever — as this Slate article notes, some of the journalistic icons of the ’30s and ’40s made stuff up. The cozy relationships the press had with people in power, the obvious conflicts of interest … okay, still far from perfect, but better than before.
Are bloggers really rising to the top by being “more objective” than mainstream sources? I don’t know of any blogger that even tries to practice objectivity (including myself). Maybe product reviewers… but really, it’s a personal medium.
The whole idea of objectivity arose because newspaper publishers realized they could get more readers by appealing to the broadest possible demographic. But we live today in an age of customization, narrow-casting and niche appeal. Rather than reading a mass-market product that strives for ideological neutrality, people can find news aggregators like Instapundit that perfectly reflect their own biases. (And this is not a knock at Glenn — he has a great site, but obviously, he’s not striving for objectivity).
So the question is, in my mind — do people really want objectivity? Suppose the Daily Planet was completely objective — the placement of its stories perfectly reflected the overall views of Metropolis. Would people still want to read it, if they also had the choice of a blogospheric news aggregator that perfectly fit their own biases? That trumpheted stories highlighting their own worldview, while ignoring and downplaying facts inconvenient to that perspective?
I don’t know the answer to that one. But if you look at the trend, particularly in the cable TV news, it seems to be toward greater subjectivity — i.e., opinionated hosts. Which must be, I imagine, what they think people want. (I’ve been watching the 9 and 10 p.m. talk shows on MSNBC and Fox this week and am pretty impressed with how right-dominated they are – but that’s a whole ‘nother subject).
Derek,
You’ve just stepped into contested terrain within the history of ideas. In science, history, and journalism, the concept of objectivity flourished in the second half of the 19th century and has been under attack since the turn of the last century. From the pinnacle of a belief in positivism and ever-increasing progress to relativism and its persistent doubts.
In history, for example, Leopold von Ranke’s oft-cited exordium “wie es eigentlich gewesen” — what really happened — was the standard by which much research and writing of history was undertaken. Ranke believed that a historian could shut out all personal biases if he focused on the primary source material and interpreted them with a set of rules. This belief has not lasted. Beginning at the end of the century and on into the 20th, historiography became an area of heated debate about these ideas. For example, one of our own historians, Becker, could not agree with Ranke. After much thought, he could see no way for the historian to free himself or herself from his particular perspective on the world. The idea of letting the documents “speak for themselves” was an illusion. Since then, there has been constant debate on this issue, but the consensus today is that Ranke’s belief in objectivity is untenable.
In journalism, the idea of objectivity, according to David Mindich in his “Just the Facts,” began with the advent of the telegraph during the Civil War. Michael Schudson in his “Discovering the News” also does a good job in detailing the history of the idea of objectivity in the news. For example, he discusses the first responses to the excesses of subjectivity in the news in the teens and twenties of last century.
“The press responded to the apparent subjectivization of facts in a variety of ways,” he writes. “One response was to openly acknowledge subjectivity as a factor in reporting. The signed news story appeared more frequently. A look at the front pages of the New York Times indicates that in the early 1920s by-lines were used sparingly. … By the 1930s, by-lines were used liberally for domestic as well as foreign correspondence. The first by-lined Associated Press story appeared in 1925. It was explained away as a special case, but within a few years the by-line was common in AP stories” (Schudson 144-5).
The by-lined article was, as you see, an acknowledgement that subjectivity was an inevitable part of reporting. A name allowed the reader to assess the reliability of the report because we could now factor in the person who actually did the reporting.
Oddly, now some expect that by-lined pieces to be “scientifically objective,” a complete reversal of the original intention of the by-line in the first place.
Hey, let’s just ask our journalists to be fair with sources and hope that they seek out the best ones available for the story. Objective? Ain’t gonn happen.
The good news is that most stories are not that complicated and our reporters get the most important elements to the readers. Of course, the Iraq National Museum story was poorly reported, using ANY criteria.
Listen, Derek, blogs have just started. They will not replace reporters. But bloggers will act as fact-checkers on steroids because the connectivity of all those people will allow average Americans with very particular areas of expertise to assess what reporters write. In a way, it isn’t fair. No fact-checking department for a newspaper will be able to compete with hundreds of thousands of eyes on the same piece. So reporters will REALLY have to be careful what they write.
Also bloggers will now take part in the debates and commentary around the articles that reporters publish.
Dont’ worry. Reporting is still a professional activity. I’m a teacher and I have no time to go and interview someone each day on a story that interests me.
Okay, this is just my first reaction to your blog entry. More thoughtful replies will show up over at Gutenblog Castle.
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Derek,
Here’s another way to look at it. Let’s view blogs as “instant letters to the editor” without the newspaper’s editors cherry-picking what they want to show. Journalists, of course, are not used to these immediate critiques and are defensive. Like I said before, get used to it NOW. As a teacher, every semester we get evaluations by students that are sent directly to the office. Our students evaluate our performance in DETAIL. Why should it be any different for reporters?
>Are bloggers really rising to the top by being “more objective” than mainstream sources?
You’re asking the wrong question. Journalists and bloggers are going to work TOGETHER in the future to create DIALOGUE. Take, for example, the Sgrena incident. No one knows what happened and there are conflicting accounts. Both journalists and blogges are asking basic questions and supporting their claims with evidence. For example, many bloggers have used photos from two Italain news outlets of Sgrena’s car to argue against her account of 300 bullets flying into the car. I’m sure you’ve followed that. If there was ever a suspicion of bias, it ought to be in Sgrena — she makes McGeough look like a light-weight. It should be noted that, as of tonight, Italian legal authorities are now warning Sgrena to stop telling lies.
I don’t know what the whole investigation will turn up, but reporters AND bloggers are driving the search for the TRUTH — and that’s good, don’t you think.
AGAIN, don’t be defensive. I understand. If someone who has never taught before wants to tell me how to teach, I’m going to be wary of their comments and intentions. The story from inside is never black and white, as you know.
Okay, more later.
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Derek,
>Are bloggers really rising to the top by being “more objective” than mainstream sources?
As you know, most reporters are generalists and god bless them for their curiosity. (There are some exceptions. My friend Jim Glanz at NYTimes has his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton and he is now reporting in Iraq.) As generalists, they have to tap others for specific knowledge. With tens of thousands of bloggers looking at a piece of news, however, chances are that someone can bring “expert testimony” to the subject IMMEDIATELY.
This is the story of Rathergate, of course. Reporters tied to 24-hour news cycles would not have chased that story down. There were hundreds of bloggers, however, who had lots of experience with typesetting and fonts and kerning and all kinds of detailed knowledge to bear on the documents that Rather (okay, Mapes, if you’re still a Dan-Fan) was trying to pass off as genuine.
You see my point?
Reporters (people with interviewing skills and the ability to turn out pieces in the “news article” genre) and bloggers (people with an amazing range of local and global knowledge) will most likely work in a kind of dialogue. And because bloggers hold onto stories longer than reporters, we may well force your editors to actually RETURN to stories and make corrections as new information comes in.
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Jeffrey,
Thanks for that very detailed and thougthful response! It kinda begs the question, though – what does objectivity even mean, when applied to journalism. (Wikipedia’s definition). I’ve always thought I could write an “objective article” if I gave both sides to all issues in public dispute and gave the reader enough facts to make his own decision.
After reading Jack Shafer’s Slate article, I don’t see blogs replacing the mainstream press either. (Although we’ll probably see more full-time bloggers in coming years). But here’s the thing. The media business is probably the least-regulated industry in America … if people want something (such as ideologically-filtered news) in an unregulated market, they’ll get it. I’m not a demon Fox critic, but I do see it as an attempt to give people news that fits their biases. Jay Rosen has speculated that in a few years, MSNBC or CNN will try to become the liberal alternative to Fox, and that will set off a domino effect. In England the national newspapers are all pretty much openly aligned with political parties … maybe the U.S. is headed that way as well.
More response to come..
The discussion of whether CNN and/or MSNBC will “try to become the liberal alternative to Fox” cracks me up. They already are Derek. That’s why Fox exists, after all.
You display the classic blindness of journalism. You *think* you are objective, therefore you are. You don’t even see your own biases, much less the biases of the major outlets. You don’t understand that blogs are a reaction to the refusal of the media to be objective or even to admit their lack of objectivity.
And yes, I know you can whip out Lexis/Nexis and provide hundreds of examples of why the media is objective, but you’re missing the forest for the trees. You point to facts that “prove” that the media “covered both sides” without even noticing the headline and the major lede of the story. The fact that the “opposing” facts are on page A15 seems not to matter to you at all. (I’m using the royal “you” here, not picking on you, Derek.)
It’s the classic story of the bias being on page one and the correction on page C14 in 10 pixel font.
Take Rathgate, for example. You fawn over Dan, talking about what a lovely guy he was. Yet you’re completely unaware that his “story” about Bush’s “special treatment” in the Guard was disproven five years prior by the Dallas Morning News. The evidence is easily found by Googling, but Dan ignored it all and plowed ahead as if it didn’t matter.
It’s the same thing some prosecutors do. They make up their mind who’s guilty and ignore any and all contrary evidence.
Until that problem is solved, blogs will flourish, and I don’t see the media even admitting that problem exists. The general response to blogs is: “We’re much more objective than you. We’re much more professional than you.”
The bloggers’ response is, “It took my all of five minutes to find contradictory facts that blow holes in your primary premise. How many more holes are there in your research?”
I didn’t mean for that comment to be anonymous. I am antimedia. http://antimedia.blogspot.com/.
Some more thoughts. Jeffrey – I wrote about Sgrena’s bizarre claims in an update to this post (scroll down). But the “300 to 400 bullets” claim was the number fired AT the vehicle, not that were said to hit it.
Italian Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini, while calling the shooting “certainly an accident”, says “more than one automatic weapon opened fire for about 15 seconds.” I do not know much about automatic weapons, but Wikipedia says an AK-47 can fire up to 600 rounds a minute, and I’m sure the U.S. military has more modern weapons than kalashnikovs. So I don’t see a contradiction there.
There are definitely some great bloggers out there who are very intellectually honest, who admit their errors and who are more interested in truth than scoring points for their “side.” And, there’s some that aren’t like that. Maybe I’ve just been reading too many of the wrong blogs… (and not that the mainstream press is perfect, either, as we’ve already discussed.)
Antimedia,
I readily admit to being biased and subjective: I’m a human being! When I write stories for my newspaper, I try to be “objective” in the sense of giving both sides of the story, etc. But derekrose.com is a personal site and I make no claims of being unbiased here … this is a blog, after all.
And as I wrote here, I do think the press has a liberal bias. (Not so sure about MSNBC though – have you watched it lately? It’s become rather conservative) But do you think Fox is more or less biased than the rest of the mainstream press?
And here’s my point: even if the press was perfectly objective, there’d still be people who’d want their news ideologically filtered. And there’d still be people who’d bash the press to gain attention for their own views.
I’m not familar with the Dallas Morning News article you mention (and couldn’t find it in a brief google search), but obviously, the whole National Guard document mess was not Rather’s finest moment.
I don’t have cable, so I never watch Fox, MSNBC or CNN. Truthfully, if I had cable, I doubt I would watch any of them anyway. I do read Fox, AP, Reuters, WaPo and many others through RSS feeds (but not CNN – I’m not a glutton for punishment, after all)
To answer your question directly – I don’t think Fox is any more biased than NBC or CBS is. (I’m referring strictly to their news reporting, not the bozos on the talk shows. I can’t stand O’Reilly, I think Matthews is an ass, Larry King is pompous, etc., etc. I can’t understand why people bother to listen to those people.)
I agree with you that people some people will want biased news, so there’s not much to argue about there.
I covered the Guard story in depth. You can find references to all the source material on my blog. The fact is, there was no story there, and Mapes and Rather desparately tried for years to manufacture one. The “story” was released when it was because it was their last ditch effort to get it out there when it might still have an effect. That’s blatantly obvious to any impartial observer.
Derek,
Agreed that “objectivity” is kind of useless. Fairness and accuracy are much more worthwhile, however. And certainly within reach of every reporter. Again, to go back Burns’ and McGeough’s articles on the Iraq National Museum, Burns was fair but inaccurate and McGeough was both unfair and inaccurate.
Let’s face one more point. Every day journalists wrestle with two confliciting news values: timeliness and accuracy.
Often if a reporter wants to be accurate they need to sit on a story while more information comes in (within reason), but ALL REPORTERS want to beat the others to get their story out there first. Certainly for all the daily journalists getting a scoop and getting it out there before anyone else brings good things to yourself and your news agency. And in this mad dash, the truth is often disregarded. I don’t know how this can be changed or should be changed. I’m just saying it’s a reality. Timeliness often trumps accuracy.
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Jeffrey – Also, just fyi, newspapers really don’t have fact-checking departments; that’s magazines. It’s a reporter’s responsibility to get his facts right.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you about reporters and bloggers happily working arm-in-arm together to create a reasoned dialogue. But that’s not what I expect. I think we’ll see more reporters getting smeared as a liberal or conservative hack the moment they make a mistake or write a story the blogosphere doesn’t like; more bloggers using minor errors in stories to attempt to discredit the article’s entire premise (while simultaneously requiring a very low standard of evidence to smear their ideological enemies); and more vitriolic attacks on reporters.
For example, are you familiar with the left-blogosphere’s attacks on Nedra Pickler, the AP reporter who covered the Kerry campaign? She was attacked as a “media whore”, had an entire website dedicated to smearing her, had her personal information posted on blogs, and just generally smeared and vilified. All for what? Most of the accusations of bias were partisan, nit-picky or just plain wrong. (E.g.).
Derek,
Did you actually read anything from that website on Nedra Pickler? Whoever runs it was even-handed, praising Pickler when the story was well-researched and well-written and thumbs-down when she wasn’t so good (and often linked to other journalists who did a better job).
From the website:
>Props again to Nedra. Quotes, attribution, sources.
>Nedra’s by far the best of the pack yesterday and today.
Um … Am I missing something here?
Derek?
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Jeffrey,
There were some positive comments on that website, sure, but even they were framed with snarky comments, “gold stars” and whatnot. (And because that’s on archive.org, you don’t get to see the pickle illustrations – admittedly kinda funny – here’s a different one:
Maybe I’m just being too sensitive? But there was worse stuff, like this: “CALL AP and Complain about Nedra ‘Tokyo Rose’ Pickler – the Big Bertha of Anti-Kerry Propaganda … [a] reprehensible Repug operative-posing-as-journalist.” It’s funny, now that she’s covering Washington, she’s one of a few journalists refusing to go along with the White House’s preferred term for Social Security, personal accounts. (“Private accounts” does strike me as more accurate). Some operative!