The Objectivity Myth

Richard Campbell – Author, Media and Culture

I teach Journalism 101, and one of the very first things I teach is there’s no such thing as objectivity in journalism and all journalism is biased. 

Clarence Page – Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

One of the biggest myths about journalism in America I think is the notion that we’re all supposed to be objective, or rather that it was always supposed to be objective. I think some people think objectivity is actually in the First Amendment [LAUGHTER] or something, folks who haven’t actually read the First Amendment.  But the fact is that objectivity came about as a commercial concept around the turn of the nineteenth century in newspapers that were being accused of being yellow journalists, of being sensationalist. They stressed as a marketing tool, you know, my, the New York Sun, the objective newspaper or whichever paper it was.

Joe Randazzo – Editor, The Onion

You can watch the Daily Show and see something that’s more truthful than what you are going to be able to read in the New York Times or watch on the CBS Evening News. There’s so much I think that gets buried under the mantra of objectivity and this idea that traditional media and news sources are striving so hard to be objective that they’re unaware of their own prejudices that are like this huge wall that’s there with everything that’s reported, and how things are reported, and how the news is filtered through these sources. 

Richard Campbell

And somehow this notion of objectivity sort of got caught up as the sort of model that journalists should strive for. But it’s a very sort of deceptive model because it’s not science. I mean, the first time a reporter chooses an image and chooses words to put on a page, they’re in the business of literature really, not in the business of science. Now what we want them to do is tell the best story they can, given the limitations that they have. And the other thing that I say about the bias factor is the main…a lot of people when they talk about bias in journalism, they want to talk about political bias. I think the biases that are more troubling in journalism are actually professional norms biases and the biases in favor of story conflict. 

Clarence Page

And that’s what today causes a tension now between the need for straightforward reporting and the need to be titillated. People like the excitement of opinions that they can argue with. So I think that’s something that we’re going to keep seeing for a while. But basically there’s still a great demand out there for objectivity. 

Bedford/St. Martin's Video Transcript