Leonard Downie (Washington Post, 1/30/23) quotes approvingly: “Decisions about which news to cover can reflect an organization’s values, whether or not these are stated publicly.” In fact, there’s no way that they can’t reflect such values.
Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor for the Washington Post from 1991 through 2008, last month published an article in the Post opinion section (1/30/23) headlined “Newsrooms That Move Beyond ‘Objectivity’ Can Build Trust.” He observed that “increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality.” He added that younger, more diverse reporters “believe that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting.”
Downie argued that news organizations should
strive not just for accuracy based on verifiable facts but also for truth—what Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have called “the best obtainable version of the truth.” This means original journalism that includes investigating and reporting on all aspects of American life.
This doesn’t mean rejecting the idea that objective facts exist. Instead, it involves accepting that news organizations’ reporting on those objective facts cannot be done in a mechanically detached way. After all, key reporting decisions—what to cover, what information to present, how to present it—depend ultimately on subjective human judgments.
‘That’s dramatic’
Bret Stephens: When your hippie-punching is so extreme that even Bill Maher (2/3/23) won’t buy it.
Bret Stephens apparently could not wrap his head around this idea. During an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher on February 3, the right-wing New York Times columnist responded to Downie’s piece:
If he were to get his way, that would be not just the end of any serious journalism in the United States, I think it would be the end of the United States.
Even Maher, who was setting Stephens up to tee off on what he saw as Downie’s loony ideas, was taken aback. “What? Wow. That’s dramatic,” Maher remarked, to the chuckling of the audience.
Stephens immediately strawmanned Downie’s argument:
I thought that was the battle we spent six years fighting the Trump administration about, that you just couldn’t say it was true that you had sold 90% of your condominiums in your fabulous new development even if it wasn’t true.
Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with Downie’s piece, which made the case for news organizations being more honest about the influence that their values inevitably have on their reporting, while sticking to factual accuracy in that reporting. Stephens apparently interpreted that as: Downie thinks the media should abandon factual accuracy.
‘View from nowhere’
Stephens (New York Times, 2/9/23) does not appreciate how much damage he personally does to corporate media’s credibility.
Unsurprisingly, Downie was not impressed by Stephens’ understanding of his position. According to Stephens, Downie asked him to actually read the report upon which the op-ed was based after his appearance on Maher’s show. Stephens then took to the opinion pages at the New York Times (2/9/23) to elaborate on his critique:
[Downie] even claims that objectivity was never a standard he upheld [at the Post], even though the principles he says were the goals he pursued as editor—“accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth”—are the same as those upheld by most objective journalists and little different from what he elsewhere says is the dictionary definition of objectivity—“using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice.”
Stephens’ column calls to mind a half-asleep high school student slogging through the reading section of the SAT. In Downie’s report—titled “Beyond Objectivity,” and co-written with former CBS News president Andrew Heyward—the authors are quite clear about the distinction between objectivity and the pursuit of truth: The former would require an impossible elimination of the influence of personal values on reporting, while the latter involves admitting that values influence reporting.
The report quotes several critics of the idea of objectivity, who collectively make the point that objectivity is simply unachievable in practice. For instance, it cites NYU professor Jay Rosen as disparaging the traditional notion of objectivity
as a form of persuasion in which journalists tried to get us to accept their account by saying something like, “I don’t have a point of view, I don’t have a starting point, I don’t have a philosophy, I don’t have an ideology. I’m just telling you the way it is. So believe it, because this is the way it is.” That’s the view from nowhere.
Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief of ProPublica, adds: “Objectivity is not even possible…. I don’t even know what it means.” And Neil Barsky, founder of the Marshall Project, continues: “The journalist’s job is truth, not objectivity…. It is getting close to the reality, notwithstanding that we all have biases and passions.”
None of these quotes show up in Stephens’ op-ed. And for good reason: They completely undermine his interpretation of the report. In his crusade for “objectivity,” Stephens seems, ironically, to have thrown inconvenient evidence out the window.
Shortcomings and blinders
What’s remarkable is that Stephens, towards the end of his essay, himself concedes that objectivity is unattainable:
All journalists are subject to the personal shortcomings and cultural blinders that make all human enterprises imperfect. And there’s never a foolproof way of capturing reality and conveying information, particularly in a pluralistic and often polarized country.
This comes after he earlier wrote, “The fact that objectivity is hard to put into practice does nothing to invalidate it as a desirable goal.” But as he says, “All human enterprises [are] imperfect.” Objectivity is not difficult to achieve; it’s a fundamental impossibility.
And its pursuit is not as valiant as Stephens would have us believe. As Downie and Heyward point out, attempts to make reporting “objective” have all too often led to “bothsidesism,” in which the pursuit of truth is simply outsourced to outside parties, who make competing claims about reality as reporters throw their hands up and tell the reader, “You decide.” This “balancing” tends to result in outsized platforms for the powerful few.
Stephens nevertheless longs for the old days of “objective” reporting. In the final paragraph of his piece, he contends:
If you still believe that a healthy democracy depends on the quality and credibility of information with which our society makes its choices, then we have few better models than the kind of objective journalism that is now going out of fashion.
‘The most honest picture of reality’
An example of the downside of “objectivity,” which for Stephens means publishing things conservatives believe regardless of whether they are true or not: He declared (New York Times, 2/21/23), based on a meta-analysis, that “the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right.” In fact, the two studies (out of 78) in the meta-analysis that actually looked at Covid and mask mandates both concluded that they reduced infection (L.A. Times, 2/24/23).
But what did that model actually look like in practice? As one illustrative example, Downie and Heyward point to early coverage of climate change:
Early stories about scientific evidence of climate change and the role of human behavior were often “balanced” with the views of climate change deniers.
Downie and Heyward are highly critical of this style of reporting, and call for a different approach. In the final section of the report, in which they make six recommendations for how news organizations can update their approach to news coverage and move beyond the myth of objectivity, their first recommendation is: “Strive not just for accuracy, but for truth.” They write:
Accuracy starts with a commitment to verifiable facts, with no compromises. But facts, while true, aren’t necessarily the whole truth. Therefore, your journalists must consider multiple perspectives to provide context where needed.
That said, avoid lazy or mindless “balance” or “bothsidesism.” If your reporting combines accuracy and open-mindedness to multiple points of view, the result should still reflect the most honest picture of reality you can present—what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein call “the best available version of the truth.”
Stephens’ true concern seems to be that news organizations will follow Downie and Heyward’s advice on exactly this point:
What Downie and Heyward dismiss in their report as “both-sides-ism” is, in reality, a crucial way to build trust with audiences, particularly in a country as diverse as America. It gives a platform to multiple views. And it shows faith that people can come to intelligent conclusions of their own.
This is perhaps the natural position for someone with as tenuous a grasp on reality as Stephens to take. Most obviously, he is well-known as a “climate change bullshitter” (Vox, 5/1/17) “whose very first article at the Times had to be corrected due to his misunderstanding of basic climate science” (FAIR.org, 6/30/17). Stephens pretends to think that journalists need to respect the facts, but when the claims his side is making are verifiably false, he wants media to publish them anyway; that’s what he means by “objectivity.”
‘Viewpoint diversity’
In the end, it turns out what Stephens is interested in is not a fair and accurate airing of the facts. His main gripe is rather a well-worn complaint of the right: The media have a liberal bias. How should we rectify this? More representation for conservatives.
He pronounces in the piece that “viewpoint diversity” is currently “the most glaring deficit in most of the American news media landscape.” And he later bemoans the media’s treatment of “religious conservatives, home-schoolers, gun owners and Trump supporters,” in particular the fact that reporters are willing to label people from these groups as “racist” or “misinformers” or “-phobic.” In other words, Stephens doesn’t want the facts in print when they reflect poorly on his side.
There are serious problems with US journalism. FAIR has decades of pieces documenting these problems. The pro-war and pro-corporate bias of prominent news outlets can be staggering. And, though Downie and Heyward’s report offers fairly moderate prescriptions for improving news coverage, the fact that mainstream voices are at least calling for a shift away from false balance in reporting is a welcome shift. That Stephens sees this as a threat says more about him than anything.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
The post Bret Stephens Says Journalists Admitting Values Would ‘End United States’ appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Conor Smyth.
Conor Smyth | Radio Free (2023-02-28T22:02:49+00:00) Bret Stephens Says Journalists Admitting Values Would ‘End United States’. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/bret-stephens-says-journalists-admitting-values-would-end-united-states/
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