Un-Learning some “Common Sense” Notions

Over the course of any given semester, I’ll be asking students to strike a balance between appreciating what a journalist is trying to accomplish and, at the same time, considering what their interpretation puts in focus and what it does not.  In other words, I’m not asking my students to swallow the news content of these works uncritically–but I’m also suggesting that they should avoid dismissing such works out of hand. Rather, I invite them to see how a work is constructed. That is, narrative journalism “constructs” a way of seeing. And that means, quite often, letting go of some of the more “seat of the pants” ways we think (or have been taught) about journalism itself.  You have to do a little un-learning, especially, about the idea of “Objectivity.”

You might notice, in what follows, that I won’t very often be falling back on the so-called binary distinction between “editorializing” and “reporting.” (What I mean by “a binary” is that falling back into simplistic, either/or thinking.)   On the contrary, what I’ll be saying is that, from the get-go,  reporting and writing always have interpretive and analytical effects. In other words, a work of narrative journalism is not just “giving us the facts,” in the colloquial way we might understand that phrase, but interpreting what those facts mean. 

The “objectivity-subjectivity trap” is a trap with two sides. Let’s start with the first side:  the side having to do with the term “objectivity.”

What do Reporters mean by “Objectivity?”

Quite often, first-time readers of narrative journalism confuse the journalistic use of the term “objectivity” with how other fields or professions (or scientists) use the same word. For instance, when reporters speak of “objectivity,” sometimes readers make the mistake of thinking that they mean something like being “value free,” or achieving pure disinterestedness or neutrality, as philosophers or social scientists sometimes use the term. That is, it can seem like reporters are claiming that they are somehow able to report on an event while remaining unaffected by their own emotions or point of view.  For example, you’ll sometimes hear it said that good reporters “don’t take sides,” that they “don’t let their feelings get in the way,” or that they “keep their opinions to themselves.” In the words of Janet Malcolm, whose work I discuss in another Short Take, we often prefer that the figure of the journalist should be “an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life” (160). Style books in the journalism trade, meanwhile, still often advise young reporters against ever using the first person, as if that is an ironclad defense against not being “objective.” This in itself reflects empiricist thinking: the idea that there is a “story” out there that should be reported “as it is.”  

However, when journalists these days cite the term “objectivity,” they usually aren’t using the social-science or scientific sense of the term at all.  Rather, they are using the idea in one or both of the following ways: 

1. for journalists, objectivity is now more often understood to refer to a method or set of techniques reporters use to check themselves and achieve balance and fairness, not to a state of being or observation that they actually ever achieve. 
2. Or, to put this another way, objectivity works more as a ritual or routine that reporters use to reassure their reader of their authority and reliability.

 In this way, you might say “objectivity” in journalism, these days, is better understood as a series of “checks” that many journalists go through, much like pre-flight checks an airplane pilot uses both before taking off in flight, and during it.  Or, if you like, it’s akin to what a surgeon does prior to heading into, and while in, the operating room: if you’re a doctor, you do everything you can to ensure that an operation is as free of contagion, faulty assumptions, and interpretive mistakes (like operating on the wrong knee) as you can make it. Like that pilot, then, you run through a checklist, so that you try to control for errors that might enter into the procedure you’re responsible for.  At best, these rituals guard you against potential pitfalls.  (For many journalists, in fact, understanding we often call their “subjectivity”  is, paradoxically, often something reporters say helps them work towards greater impartiality. They try to check for weaknesses they recognize in themselves, and then try not to let it influence their views too much.)

Moreover, these checks or routines happen at all three levels: 

• (1) prior to reporting, 
• (2) while journalists are reporting and investigating, and–here’s an important thing we tend to overlook–
• (3) in the rhetorical qualifications that journalists commonly insert in what they eventually write.  

Why break the question of objectivity down into these three phases? 

Well, for many journalists–again, we have to remember not everyone does cite this ideal–it shows us that “objectivity” is really a kind of interlocking system.  For instance, under (1) above, you don’t write an exposé on a company in which you hold stock or which is run by a relative. In the second, (2) reporting phase, a common check is trying to consult opposing sides of an issue, or calling every source back to make sure a quotation or factual claim is correctly verified. In the third (3) writing phase, a commonplace self-check is the careful use of attribution when quoting (“According to the Pentagon…”), so as to make clear one’s sources for what one is calling a fact. There are, in fact, lots of rhetorical devices that reporters try to use: for instance,

• neutral or non-inflammatory language, or

• categories that are broad enough to be inclusive without being partisan.  (So, for instance, “refugees” might be called “migrants” if it can’t be proven the people the journalists are writing about have actually been exiled from their home country and/or can’t return.)

And so, to review.

•  First, even for journalists who cite this idea, objectivity isn’t a “final state”–it’s operating more like a process of continuous self-regulation.  Moreover, each of the three phases of “checks” often depend upon each other, and can’t be used, quite often, without the others.  It won’t help, for instance, if a reporter uses neutral language if they haven’t actually verified a set of facts in the first place. (Maybe who they are writing about are refugees, for instance, by international standards.)
• Second, these analogies to airplane piloting or surgery are helpful because they remind us that such “checks” don’t produce purely antiseptic or perfect surgeries, or flights without danger or breakdowns.  They merely help to guard against certain risks. And in the same way, the rituals of journalistic objectivity don’t guarantee the achievement of pure disinterestedness for any particular journalistic report.  (In fact, that almost never happens, because again reports are “constructing” a view, inevitably.)
• And finally (as I suggest throughout this site), even the attempt to remain objective in this restricted journalistic sense doesn’t mean the reporter avoids making an interpretation of some kind.  This is, in fact, the biggest pitfall of confusing the methods behind reportorial objectivity with actually achieving the Philosopher’s ideal.  The interpretation is always there; it’s not “editorializing,” but the “lens” I have described is always in play.

. . . and here’s the final kicker about “objectivity”

The simple fact is that quite a few narrative journalists do not use objectivity as their gold standard or ideal at all.  In so-called immersion  reporting, for example, writing about what one feels or thinks is actually at a premium—those things are not to be repressed or hidden from the reader, at all. As I will show in Chapter 4, especially, this witnessing or testimonial dimension has a long history in narrative journalism–in some ways, a longer history than the modern idea of “objectivity.” Indeed, many journalists often suspend attribution, too, when they are using anonymous sources or—as I’ll show in Chapter 3—trying to enhance the literary “realism” of their narrative.

Don’t Journalists Have “Subjectivity”?

Now, it’s important to be clear here.  Sure, journalists are, like all of us, human beings—fallible beings.  They necessarily filter experience through their own backgrounds, preferences, and training. They also have, as I mean to show in the coming Chapters, interpretive vocabularies and literary models at the ready for shaping how they will see and represent events. So, yes, of course—they are always filtering and re-crafting their reports through this thing we often call their subjectivity, and often through political ideology as well.  Moreover, many journalists intentionally bring their identities into play when they write. For many journalists of color, for instance, advocacy journalism, or mixing personal memoir with reportage, can flow naturally from their given social identities–and certainly it can be a double standard if they are disqualified for doing so. (In fact recently, reporter Suki Kim found her undercover narrative of North Korea,Without You, There is No Us [2014], dismissed as “only” a personal memoir for just that reason.)¹ [1]   And it’s worth remembering that the “checking” process is necessarily human and imperfect. But none of the above means that journalists won’t try to be fair, to listen to alternative perspectives, and so on.   

Avoid a litmus test approach to Objectivity

If we get too focused on objectivity as readers, we often start using it as a “litmus” test–that is, either a journalist “fails” or “succeeds” because of it. But there are any number of traps here.

For one, it becomes very easy to mistake the sympathetic orientation of a particular narrative, or the conclusions it draws, for “bias” of some kind.  For instance, suppose you read a book about young girls growing up in a gang-ridden neighborhood, and in that story the journalist clearly creates a sympathetic portrait of one of those girls. But if you apply a litmus test of “objectivity,” you might well have confused the end result of an investigation with supposed “bias” leading into it.  That is, what you’re seeing, instead, is merely the shape of the interpretation the journalist has forged.

The second trap of a litmus test like this is that you can easily end up acting as if reporters are themselves unaware of their own interpretive tendencies or preferences. On the contrary, writers of long-form narrative journalism can be quite transparent and explicit about (a) their political beliefs and (b) their departures from mainstream norms about the method of objectivity and (c) how their relationship to their subjects might have evolved. Indeed, as John Pauly has pointed out, the New Journalism may have opened the door for newspapers to mark their work as interpretive.² Thinking we are, as readers, somehow in the business of “unmasking” their bias or subjectivity is often trivializing, and often beside the point.  

When I’m teaching, I often quote a famous saying from an American historian of anthropology, James Clifford, who points out that works of interpretation are always “partial,” in the two main senses of this word. In the first sense, works of narrative journalism are “partial” in the sense that they are the creation of human beings, and thus necessarily reflective of the human processes and the individuals who created them, even when such individuals try to hold themselves in check by professional-journalistic norms. Naturally, as I’ll be saying in subsequent chapters, there are limitations in how they see and interpret and represent the world they report on. But that’s where the second meaning of “partial” comes in: works of narrative journalism are always “partial” in the sense that they are always incomplete. The interpretive lenses that reporters build for us will invariably have their own shape, foci, and even their blind spots. That’s just intrinsic to what they do.        

In the end, the charge that a writer isn’t “objective,” or is “too subjective,” can be a little like saying a fish swims and breathes underwater. Show me one that doesn’t, and then we’ll talk.

Notes

1. Kim’s discussion of her double bind can be found on the New Republic’s website:  “The Reluctant Memoirist,” at https://newrepublic.com/article/133893/reluctant-memoirist ↩︎
2. On interpretive assumptions, seeJohn Pauly’s “The New Journalism and the Struggle for Interpretation.” Journalism, vol. 15, no. 5 (2014): 589-604. ↩︎