Last week, at an election night party, a few folks who know me primarily from my work as a journalist asked if I was attending the event in hopes of writing a story about it. When I told them no, that I was just there as a friend and supporter of the candidate, one or two of them expressed surprise. Pleasant surprise, but surprise nonetheless.
By sharing information about my personal political beliefs with people who know me as a journalist, I did something that many journalists consider taboo.
For the last century or so, journalists have been encouraged to obscure their own beliefs and conclusions, and have ordained that act of misdirection with glowing encomiums like “objectivity” and “neutrality.” But the origins of the norms sanctified by those names are less noble than most would guess, and their impact has contributed to a record-low 28% trust in news media.
When I became a journalist, I knew I didn’t want to do it that way. I knew I wanted to bring my audience the facts. Practices like “objectivity” and “neutrality,” as they currently exist, present systemic obstacles to that goal.
Journalists are encouraged to hide their own views and beliefs in order to present themselves as neutral observers. Right from the beginning of the reporting process, this norm introduces an element of untruth into the story. There are no neutral observers. And that’s not just my opinion: neutrality is quite literally not an ability the human brain has evolved.
But the fact that it’s inherently misleading is not the only problem with journalistic neutrality as it’s currently practiced. By aspiring to be neutral, a journalist must also aspire to be ignorant. In the act of performing perfect neutrality, a journalist must assert that he or she has been able to acquaint themselves with all of the relevant facts of a story, and yet remained unable to form any conclusions. And I don’t mean values-based conclusions like right or wrong, I mean fact-based conclusions like “this is a lie.” The current practice of journalistic neutrality is an enforced inability to form conclusions, and it is a direct disservice to the audience.
This is, of course, what people mean by both-sidesing. The neutral recitation of “both sides” of an argument, even when one is wrong, dishonest, or entirely fabricated.
I understand that the goal of the norm is for journalists to hold themselves at a distance so that their own convictions do not impact the reporting, so that the final product is a recitation of facts. But omitting the fact of the journalist’s presence undercuts that premise from the jump.
Maybe more to the point, even a plain recitation of facts can distort reality. Journalism professor David Mindich has argued that the neutral tone of reporting by outlets like the New York Times on the topic of racist lynchings in the 1890s, which entailed newspapers listing the usually-false allegations made against the deceased for the sake of “false balance,” helped normalize the practice of lynching. It was the journalistic work of Ida B. Wells, free from the pretense of neutrality, which helped bring the practice to an end.
The Times‘ neutral tone has continued receiving criticism in the 130 years since.
The pretense of neutrality also obscures another fundamental fact, found from the quantum level all the way up to the level of human interaction: observation impacts reality. Removing the journalist, the observer, from the story for the sake of neutrality or objectivity is, itself, an act of editorializing. It is a mediation of the facts before they are presented to the audience.
Consider the way quotes are presented in most view-from-nowhere journalism, as if they were spoken into the ether. But they weren’t. They were spoken in a specific context, to a specific person, and that is the only context in which they can be fully understood. By removing the journalist from the story, you also remove critical context. This is part of why I write in the first-person – I was there, and that’s one of the facts on the table. When I produce the in-depth investigative work I enjoy so much, I work to fade into the background as much as possible and responsible, for the sake of letting the subject of my story breathe, but I still make sure to end quotes with things like “she told me,” rather than “she said.”
Norms like neutrality or objectivity might seem modern and enlightened, but their origins are anything but. The concept of objectivity – unrealistic as it may be – is usually attributed to journalist and social theorist Walter Lippmann, who introduced it in his 1922 book Public Opinion. But, for Lippmann, the goal of journalism was not just truth, it was control. Lippmann had a distinctly negative view of his fellow man, seeing them as a “bewildered herd,” unable to understand the complexities of modern life. Lippmann theorized that the only way to maintain a democracy, then, was to have a small class of government and media elites shepherding and influencing public opinion with a sort of benevolent propaganda. This idea was one of the subjects of Lippmann’s long-running debate with philosopher John Dewey, and is what led Lippmann to coin the phrase “manufacture of consent.”
Neutrality, as it was introduced and as it is mostly still practiced, is not neutral at all: it is partisan to the status quo.
Authoritarian ideas aside, the major factor which really accelerated the adoption of neutrality and the “view from nowhere” style was cold, hard cash. Starting in the late 19th century, advertisers started warning newspapers away from partisanship, because it limited circulation and would hurt ad revenue. Over the next few decades, along with the influence of Lippmann, the American news media became neutralized largely for the sake of being saleable in as many markets as possible.
For my part, I think that high-minded defenses of these largely failed norms also contain a certain disdain for the audience; an implication that they cannot be trusted to separate the facts from the person reporting the facts, even though that’s an aspect of virtually every human interaction.
I choose to trust the audience to handle the facts, including the fact of my presence in the process. And, as far as I can tell, it works. Being a lefty has not limited me to covering lefty stories or having an entirely lefty audience. I have won awards for stories in which almost every source was a conservative Christian, and I built trust with those sources the same way I try to build trust with my audience: by showing up honestly. By telling them who I am and finding out if that’s someone they’re willing to open up to, and taking it from there. I never want to trick a source, and I never want to trick a reader.
That same honesty is why, as a publication, the Colorado Times Recorder has more conservative readers than you might guess. Why? Because they assume that almost all news media is coming from the left, and they appreciate that we are being honest about it. Sometimes they even send us nice emails.
There are many ways to do good journalism. First-person writing is my preference for a number of reasons described above, but even more traditional styles can excel when freed from century-old norms born not from the pursuit of truth, but from a desire for control and commercialization. There is a need for it, and – with trust in the media at 28% – there is an appetite for it.
So I ask you, what’s more trustworthy: journalism which discloses its viewpoint, or journalism which pretends not to have one? I’ll take Ida B. Wells every time.
