‘Objectivity’ Obliterates Empathy and Curiosity – Guest perspective

FAIR’s commentary by Conor Smyth (2/28/23) on former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr.’s anti-objectivity manifesto (Washington Post, 1/30/23), and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens’ overwrought response to it (2/9/23), was right on point.

Leonard Downie Jr. (Washington Post, 1/30/23): The “objectivity” standard was “dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly white newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world.”

I wouldn’t exactly characterize Downie’s shot across the bow of the mantra of corporate media as a mea culpa, since he says he didn’t consider “objectivity” a standard for his newsroom when he was the Post’s managing editor under Ben Bradlee from 1984–1991, and executive editor from 1991–2008. But, since he also says he “stopped…making up my own mind about issues” when he served in those roles—something I consider impossible to do and silly to declare—it’s an open question as to whether the Post didn’t fall prey to some of the same assumptions made by those who embrace “objectivity.”

As welcome as Downie’s indictment of “objectivity” is, it comes across as a little anticlimactic to me, even milquetoast, at least in his Post op-ed, though Smyth’s piece suggests that the full report Downie wrote with former CBS News president Andrew Heyward is stronger. To wit, the op-ed quotes high-up editors at establishment outlets, including the Post, New York Times, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, CBS, NBC and AP—whereas the report also quotes NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. Ironically, by leaving Rosen and his critique of corporate media’s supposed lack of ideology out of the article, Downie reproduces the same narrow range of acceptable opinion “objectivity” has been bringing us all along; in other words, nobody too far to the left.

Nevertheless, Downie calls out allegiance to “objectivity” as a threat to democracy, while Stephens warns that Downie’s audacity in questioning the old saw is what threatens our democratic institutions. Downie is right.

Shoring up biases

The real threat to democracy continues to be the fervor with which too many arbiters of what gets printed or broadcast cling to notions of “objectivity” that were never logical, achievable nor fair. Those notions have always served to both shore up the biases of the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable, and excuse unconscionable laziness on the part of reporters and editors who blithely continue to see themselves as smart and hard-working.

“Objectivity,” as defined by many of the most powerful media properties in the US, is just idiotic, and always has been. “Using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice,” the definition Downie offers, is not possible, and has led intelligent journalists to assert, obtusely, that they have no personal beliefs.

False equivalence: ABC‘s Matthew Dowd on Twitter (11/1/16)

Many believe that of themselves, wholeheartedly. Under this pretense, this delusion, the unacknowledged biases that have held sway at newspapers and TV stations have been those of rich, straight, white men.

The fear of being called biased has also led to “bothsideism,” the empty and intellectually dishonest practice of citing actors on either side of an issue without indicating whether one of them is lying, or giving equal time to stories that don’t warrant such treatment. (Think of the false equivalency of corporate media coverage of Charlottesville, which spent as much time denouncing anti-Nazis as Nazis—FAIR.org, 9/13/17.)

Diversifying newsrooms, Downie maintains, are calling all that into question, and hurrah for that. Though my experience tells me that it’s going to be tough for many at the top of the food chain to unlearn habits of mind they don’t even see as habits, but rather as the definition of doing the job right. It’s just so unconscious. And self-censorship by young people—leaving stuff out that would make their editor look askance at them—is real.

Jousting with ‘objectivity’

When I was a journalist, I jousted with “objectivity,” not unlike Don Quixote with that windmill. I started out in the left press, working at Southern Exposure and The Nation. Deciding I wanted to be writing every day, I went to Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism so I could scrub my resume, make sure I didn’t look like a communist, and get a job at daily paper. It worked! After graduation, off I went to a summer internship at the St. Petersburg Times and then a reporting job at the Louisville Courier-Journal.

There I was, wanting to tell the truth, expose evil and bring a voice to the voiceless, surrounded by fellow reporters who were motivated by, well, I couldn’t actually tell. I didn’t know what the heck they were doing there, and couldn’t grasp why they even wanted to be journalists. For they insisted that they had no opinions about anything.

But, as much as I was a fish out of water—in that I owned that I had deeply held beliefs, and was a product of my upbringing, with the inherent biases any and all upbringings bring—I understood what my job required. I knew that I had to keep my opinions out of the paper, and give equal space—which in those days literally meant the same amount of inches in the story—to both sides. Indeed, I argued (at home, to my partner, not in the newsroom) that the fact that I was aware of my own opinions made me better able to conform to daily journalism’s definition of “objectivity” than those who denied they had biases, and were therefore more likely to introduce said biases into their copy.

In practice, I usually wrote stories that embodied “objectivity” standards, but sometimes, out of paranoia, bent over backwards so far I introduced bias contrary to my own opinions into the paper. Case in point: When a state court issued a ruling on abortion, I knew the reaction piece had to give equal time to the local pro-choice forces and Kentucky Right to Life. But the head of the latter’s state chapter told me she didn’t know what she thought, and she’d need to call the national office to find out (which I didn’t have time for her to do). Since I was familiar with that side’s beliefs and priorities, even though they weren’t my own, I asked her, “Don’t you think this?” and “Don’t you think that?” and turned my story in on time.

Maybe I could have quoted her saying she didn’t know what she thought, and made her look like the ninny that she was, though that probably wouldn’t have made it into print. To be honest, sensitive to my editors’ suspicions about me, I probably gave her more inches than I gave NARAL and local abortion providers.

Illegitimate experience

But the experiences that indelibly burned into my mind the dangers of the assumptions that lay beneath the altar of “objectivity” came when I covered stories about working-class white people in Kentucky’s Appalachian mountains, and working-class Black people in Louisville’s West End.

When I attempted to provide context about structural, multi-generational poverty and racism while covering the news of the day, my editors refused to let me quote the people directly affected by the problems. Their experiences, and the solutions they’d identified out of their lived experience and that of their communities, as well as their own indefatigable research, were flat-out considered illegitimate.

After all, they were poor. They had accents. They didn’t have advanced degrees. They didn’t work for the government. They weren’t owners of coal mines or landfills. They didn’t control university boards. They certainly didn’t control local media.

I came to realize that one of the least discussed but most insidious and anti-democratic threats posed by the media’s concept of “objectivity” was its ironclad refusal to give up its definition of what constitutes an “expert.” That bias extended not only to refusing to give those suffering under unjust policies the courtesy of weighing in substantively on developments that directly threatened them. It also maintained an inviolate firewall against allowing those outside the halls of power to define what was news in the first place.

ABC‘s Maxine Crooks (Washington Post, 1/30/23): “We have to be able to use the voices of people whose neighborhoods we don’t normally go into and tell these stories from their vantage point.”

To editors, “objectivity” could only be maintained by citing people who nearly always had higher education and were affiliated with establishment institutions: universities, government, hospitals, corporations, well-known nonprofits. That leaves out a lot of people! It also sidelines informal groups formed for collective action, like the community organization created by residents of a mobile home park in Appalachia whose water supply had been declared carcinogenic by the state, and whose bills from the public utility were so high they couldn’t pay them.

Downie acknowledges this as one of the dangers of “objectivity,” and in the report advocates creating new beats and bringing back beats, such as labor, that have been mothballed. He quotes ABC’s Maxine Crooks saying her network’s stations are attempting to address the narrowcasting of “objectivity” by increasing coverage of real life, and have created “race and culture content” teams towards that end. “We have to be able to use the voices of people whose neighborhoods we don’t normally go into and tell these stories from their vantage point,” she says.

Stephens also, sort of, but not really, argues for a wider definition of who counts as newsworthy, by throwing a pity party for gun owners and religious fundamentalists, people he insists get ignored because of the media’s liberal bias.

Predictable and patronizing

I think it’s extremely difficult for highly educated, powerful people to even consider that those whose life experiences differ so greatly from their own possess wisdom, and to quote them in ways that lend their insights credence and heft.

Downie’s conceptual admonition about “objectivity” leaving out important voices, as welcome as it is, isn’t the only source of pressure on the legacy media to do a better job at quoting poor people and people of color and poor people of color. Other counties have been heard from.

Michael Moore

Trump’s 2016 victory shocked the talking heads, who really are coastal elites and really do live in bubbles, except for Michael Moore, who lives in Michigan and was one of few media figures to predict that election’s outcome. (I’m being facetious that he’s the only one, but you get the idea.) Much hand-wringing about journalists’ failure to report deeply from the heartland followed.

And so we were treated to predictable, patronizing stories that purported to respect Trump voters, but not-so-sneakily made them look, at best, like ignorant dupes. “Objectivity” obliterates empathy, it seems, as well as curiosity. Despite media vows to no longer resort to flyovers, those stories just served to reiterate divisions, reducing our complex country of complicated people into one with simple-to-grasp but inaccurate categories, like the one that suggests all working-class people are white, and the one that holds all working-class white people vote Republican. And don’t get me started on J.D. Vance. (See sidebar.)

Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s May 2020 murder put pressure on newsrooms to address their failures on covering racism. Regional media outlets are similarly put under the microscope each time another police killing occurs in a different city or state. Notwithstanding the Times’ 1619 Project, which got underway in 2019, it remains to be seen whether, in the corporate media as a whole, especially in outlets less illustrious than the Times, promises to do better on race are going to pan out.

And even though states passing or aiming to pass Don’t Say Gay and anti–Critical Race Theory laws are focused on schools, universities and libraries, it’s not off the wall to worry that such laws will have a chilling effect on non-national media outlets that had maybe begun inching towards implementation of claims to hire more Black and brown journalists and give them the power to direct coverage.

Writing off red states

If, say, you live in a big city in the Northeast, media coverage would have you think that there are zero folks who vote blue in the red states, who share progressive values and are fighting the good fight, and that’s patently untrue. You would think there’s nobody Black in Appalachia, and that’s not true, either.

My neighbors in Brooklyn sure believe such things. During Trump, several suggested we should just write off the South, because everyone there is a racist and it’s pointless to try to change their minds.

Patty Wallace and Ruth Colvin (Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, 11/24/16)

Folks in Eastern Kentucky were and are accustomed to outsiders thinking they can’t be trusted to know what’s best for themselves. They’ve been dealing with that for generations. It wasn’t surprising to Patty Wallace and Ruth Colvin, two gray-haired women who’d crept through the woods to take photos of workers standing in clouds of toxic asbestos dust employed by people thought by many, including prosecutors in New York, to have organized crime connections to illegally dump hazardous waste in a landfill meant for household garbage, that my editors wouldn’t let me report on their derring-do in the public’s interest. They knew they were not seen as the type of people who have their own agency and can solve problems.

Not long ago, Joan Robinett, a powerhouse activist from Harlan County, told me there wasn’t a single family her son, Dan, had grown up with who hadn’t been affected by Oxycontin. Yet despite the misery sweeping her rural community and so many others like it, for too long media coverage of the opioid epidemic didn’t reach the critical mass necessary to achieve two important goals: make those losing family members to painkillers feel seen, and force policy makers to substantively address the nightmare. And that’s in part because the people dying were people the media didn’t see, people who didn’t have so-called “experts” speaking up for them.

The opioid crisis, of course, is just one of many issues in rural America that are ignored or undercovered by the media. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that “objectivity,” and its bias against anyone who isn’t considered an “expert” by the status quo, helped lead to Trump’s election, as he preyed on the legitimate sense prevalent in many communities that their suffering didn’t matter.

I think this is something many well-meaning urban sophisticates fail to grasp. They shrug their shoulders and ask, “Why do they keep voting against their own interests?” as if that’s a rhetorical question, rather than a question that could be answered if they bothered to take a walk in the shoes of those they disdain. If they considered how they would feel—and vote—if they had had their lands and labor exploited and their intelligence insulted for generations by the country’s rich and powerful, with media offering nothing but justification for those behaviors and attitudes.

Breaking unspoken rules

Back at the C-J, I persisted. I wrote stories nobody else at the paper thought were stories, like the one about the Asian grocery that carried ingredients requested by immigrants from across the world that they couldn’t buy anywhere else in town, and the one about a Muslim feminist professor’s class on The Satanic Verses after the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie.

Rev. Louis Coleman (image: WHAS11, 2/25/21)

Soon after I became the higher education reporter, the state government—without bothering to give advance notice to Woodford Porter, the West End funeral parlor scion who was the University of Louisville’s one Black board member—altered U of L’s admissions policies in such a way that fewer Black students would be admitted, thereby threatening the “urban mission” of its state charter. I covered the protest at U of L’s board meeting. It was organized by the Rev. Louis Coleman, Louisville’s most prominent Black activist, and Anne Braden, a white woman who’d dedicated her life to anti-racist work after her husband was accused of sedition and jailed for selling a house in a white neighborhood to a Black family.

Then, when a mid-level functionary in the federal Department of Education said that U of L couldn’t spend money earned at Arizona’s Fiesta Bowl on minority scholarships (U of L’s football team was only invited because other schools were boycotting Arizona for refusing to honor the MLK holiday), I broke what became a national story, picked up by the New York Times, etc., about the threat this ruling posed to affirmative action in general. It wasn’t long before George H.W. Bush’s administration put the kibosh on that initiative.

Soon after I’d written those stories, according to a Black state representative who spoke with me off the record, U of L’s president called the Courier-Journal’s publisher and told him to get Robin Epstein off his back. So much for the supposed separation between journalism’s church and state, the publishing side and the editorial side of the newspaper. I’d broken the unspoken rule that the paper didn’t probe Louisville’s racial inequities, because doing so might lead to unrest. The city’s fathers didn’t want a reprise of the busing riots of 1975.

Did the paper celebrate that I’d recognized that a local story raised questions that pertained far beyond U of L, and done enough digging to place it in a larger context? Were the editors proud that one of their reporters had perhaps helped save the college education of untold numbers of minority students across the country? No.

‘Don’t ask for too much’

Emily Bingham (left) and Eleanor Bingham Miller (Courier-Journal, 6/1/21): “The shortcomings of the companies our family own are real—and many.”

I’d arrived at the C-J in 1988, two years after Gannett bought the paper, and rocking the boat was certainly not encouraged. My fellow reporters often lamented that it wasn’t the way it used to be. Indeed, historically, under the Bingham family, which owned the paper from 1918 to 1986, the C-J had had enterprising moments for a publication of its size. Though it’s hard to imagine, given the current sorry state of daily newspapers thanks to media consolidation and contraction, the C-J at one time had its own foreign correspondents! (Joel Brinkley won the paper a Pulitzer in 1980 for a series from Cambodia.)

But even in its heyday, which began well before school desegregation and lasted a decade after it, when budgets were flush as compared to under Gannett, the paper didn’t dig deep on the lack of racial justice in its own backyard.

In the summer of 2021, a year and a few months after Breonna Taylor was murdered, historian Emily Bingham and her aunt, Eleanor Bingham Miller, put out a statement apologizing for the lack of forthright coverage of racism when their family owned the C-J:

We have no doubt the shortcomings of the companies our family owned are real—and many. These failings of the “‘public trust” harmed Black lives and extended white supremacy in our community. The Courier Journal advocated progress for Black people but only at the pace its owners and editors considered manageable and appropriate. Our constant refrain was “go slow,” “don’t ask for too much at once,” “don’t you see we’re trying to help you?” and more of the like.

Scuttlebutt I’ve read posted on Facebook by friends in Louisville, including some former C-J reporters, indicates that the paper nowadays is thinner than ever, though I have seen a few good pieces it’s published since Taylor was killed.

However, back in the early ’90s, my punishment for breaking that unspoken rule, for covering (not creating) news about institutional racism, and for following the implications of that news to its logical conclusion? I was yanked off the higher ed beat and banished to the Southern Indiana bureau. When I quit a few months later, the editor who had hired me had the condescending gall to tell me in my exit interview that I would now be able to “think globally and act locally.” That was his way of saying I’d never belonged in a newsroom in the first place, because I had opinions and couldn’t be “objective.” As if he could.

A need for humility

To me, perhaps the most depressing thing about the way adherents to the “objectivity” principle go about their business is their utter lack of humility. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t think about it. As long as they lazily give equal time to “both sides,” they think they’ve passed muster. As Downie says, that lets mainstream journalists off the hook from their responsibility to search hard for and report the truth to the best of their ability.

But it also gives them permission to avoid questioning whether their own lives have in any way blinkered them to who is a legitimate source and to what is a legitimate story. So, they reflexively reproduce pieces that fit into preordained formats sanctioned by their bosses, who also operate under their own unexamined devotion to a narrow, class-bound, racist, sexist, homophobic and superficial conception of expertise.

The discourse churned out by the legacy media, despite Downie’s hope that self-critique is underway and will result in meaningful change, still falls short of reflecting the reality of the lives lived by people who don’t run the nation’s newsrooms. And our democracy is so much poorer for it.

Sidebar:

It’s Structural, Not Pathological

Here are some resources if you’re hungry for some Appalachian perspectives that provide an antidote to Sen. J.D. Vance’s corrosive, self-serving, victim-blaming bootstrap-ism.