Some **MidTerm** Quality Comment on Objectivity

English: Flowchart of the steps in the Scientific Method (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Michael Schudson's simple definition: "Objectivity is the idea that values can be separated from facts and should be." (He doesn't think they can.)

David Mindich: "If American journalism were a religion, as it has been called from time to time, its supreme deity would be objectivity."

More from Mindich. Journalists sometime resort to metaphors to define what they are doing. Journalism is a:

* window
* a mirror
* a seesaw
* a net

All these metaphors suggest that the job of the journalist is oddly passive. “Reality” sets the agenda, as it does for the scientist. Even those journalists who understand the difficulty of the job of being objective fall back on metaphor, one reporter suggesting that objectivity is the “North star” of journalism, distant and unobtainable but still able to guide us – and guide us right."

David Mindich breaks it down into five historical components:

• detachment - make “sure the facts are doing the talking, not the reporters own preconceived notions.”
• nonpartisanship - offer “both sides” of the story.
• the inverted pyramid - give the reader the most important facts in the lead paragraph, the implication being that what the most important facts are is self-evident.

• facticity (which Michael Schudson calls naïve empiricism) – identify the information that accurately reports “the truth or reality of the event.”

• balance - present “undistorted reporting."

Take deep breath. Focus. Go to Mindich.

As you can see from these comments and from your reading, definitions of objectivity often overlap and are murky to the point of confusion.

More deep breaths: Read Jay Rosen on bias.

Bottom line? Recognize your own biases and/or values? Be transparent as an individual and as a news entity? Journalists often fall back on the term when defending what they do. Critics of journalism often employ the term when attacking news coverage they do not like.

And here's a comment by journalism professor Philip Meyer in relation to "community journalism" in which the journalist is not passive but active, beginning with clear assumptions about what the community needs to know:

Objectivity, as defined by the knee-jerk, absolutist school of media ethics, means standing so far from the community that you see all events and all viewpoints as equally distant and important -- or unimportant. It is implemented by giving equal weight to all viewpoints and assertions --or, if not, all an interesting variety within a socially acceptable spectrum. The result is a laying out of facts in a sterile, noncommittal manner, and then standing back to "let the reader decide" which view is true.

This, in effect, is objectivity of result, defining objectivity not by the way we go about our business of gathering and interpreting the news, but by what we put in the paper. It can be measured out: so many lines for this group, so many for that. In an effort to be fair, we sprinkle our resources to produce as even an effect as we can.

Critics of objectivity get a lot to chew on when that is the definition. And one form of reaction is to declare that objectivity is impossible. No matter how delicately we sprinkle, we'll never get it right. Might as well be honest about it, these critics say, listen to our subjective inner voices, and write and report from a clearly stated point of view. Some journalists who think that way will surely seize on public journalism as an excuse to do it.

And even the advocates of public journalism, Davis Merritt in particular, admit that it is a hazard. When you start caring about how public debate goes, even if you don't prefer a particular outcome, you start making subjective decisions about what to focus on and when. Journalistic passivity is abandoned. One solution is to draw a line somewhere on the slippery slope, be subjective up to that point, and then stop.

There is a better solution, and it is already being adopted by reporters who use data-intense methods. Investigative reporters like Barlett and Steele in Philadelphia and Steve Doig in Miami practice objectivity of method, not objectivity of result. Barlett and Steele are mad as hell about the way things are going in America, and their writing shows it. A piece of Doig's roof was torn off by Andrew, and he wasn't happy about that. But both reporting projects followed the objective scientific standard of replicability. They informed their investigations with theories about the underlying causes of events. They developed operational tests of those theories. And they documented the steps in executing their tests with a paper trail that any other investigator could find and follow and come out with the same results.

This is scientific method applied to the practice of journalism. One of its beauties is that it requires no departure at all from the enlightenment philosophy that gave us our stance of prickly individualism. The political philosophers of the eighteenth century derived their ideas from the development of scientific method. Free expression should be encouraged, John Milton argued, because new things are learned every day, and an idea that seems false now might be proved true tomorrow. And even a false idea could contain a kernel of truth that, exposed to light, would grow and prevail.

Robertson: But this method only applies to big stories with big commitment of time and big commitment of money. So we end as we end with most of our ethical inquiry in this class: We recognize the problem and we try to ask the right questions....

And we put quotation marks around "objectivity," at least when it comes to journalism.