Your Father’s Fair-and-Balanced

It’s one of the great debates of our day, or at least my college journalism classes: Can journalism be objective?

This wonk swears there’s no liberal bias in the news media; that tycoon makes a mint proving him wrong by catering to Americans who are sick of liberal bias. They’re both right. And wrong.

As far as I can tell, most journalists do their best to stick to the middle, to leave their own views at the dinner table, to give the people the information they need to be responsible citizens. Objectivity is a worthy goal, and it is a necessary one. It’s also impossible.

At the founding of our republic, the partisanship of the press was at such a pitch that Thomas Jefferson wrote that the man who read nothing was better informed than the man who read only newspapers. William Randolph Hearst started the Spanish-American War. The founders of Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times considered their publications extensions of their own tongues, agents of political influence over the body politic.

Objective journalism was the exception before broadcast news accepted the responsibility associated with the use of the people’s airwaves. The Cronkite and Brokaw generations of journalists were not so much high-water marks of objectivity in journalism, but more like a flood in the desert.

Today, cable television and the Internet have diluted this fleeting responsibility with the proliferation of news sources. Don’t like the coverage you get on the Tiffany network? Shop around. There’s a talking head for every viewpoint and a market for every brand and degree of slant.

I’d like to have one news source that gives me all of the reliable and objective facts that I need to be a citizen. I could watch or read for an hour or two a day and rest in the knowledge that I was a well-informed American. I will never, for at least two reasons. The first is commonly referred to as gate-keeping, and the other I want to call middle-making.

A classmate of mine published a story recently that illustrates these functions by their absence. The story concerns a graduate of the law school at my university who is suing the school. My classmate’s article was well-written and objective. I use her article merely as an example of the rare occasion when gate-keeping and middle-making are not an issue.

The Gatekeeper
What is a story? For a university paper, a graduate suing her school leaves no question; the story must be covered as and whenever it develops. Easy. What about a street protest? If you were the editor of the Washington Post, published in a city that sees nearly continuous protest, would it matter to you when considering whether to run such a story how many people attended a protest? Would the object of protest enter into the decision of which story to possibly bump from the front page? How many people would have to show up, and protesting what, before you gave the demonstration a front-page photo and a banner headline? Would you consider these factors?

Of course you would, it’s your job to guess (or decide) what people think is important. You’re a gatekeeper.

Newspaper editors might do their best to answer these questions in accord with what they understand to be the desires of their readers. There is no way to call their answers objective.

The Middle-Maker
Where is the middle? Believers in objective journalism inevitably advocate that reporters represent “both sides of a story,” positions necessarily on opposite sides of some middle point. In the report on the university lawsuit, the sides of the story are clearly set: the plaintiff on one side, the defendant on the other, the law in the middle, any other commentators on the outside.

What though are the two sides of a story on the situation in Darfur? The U.S. government vs. the Sudanese government or the aggregate of Western foreign policy vs. the Sudanese government or the Arabs vs. the Africans or Democrat foreign policy vs. Republican foreign policy or the hawks vs. the doves? Could a sane American journalist possibly present the side of the Janjaweed?

This might be an extreme case. Ambiguity in the notion of “both sides” exists inherently however in almost any news story, no matter who is covering it. The extremity of the Darfur case only highlights a characteristic of news in general.

What are the sides of the health care debate, the Hurricane Katrina story, the war in Iraq? It doesn’t matter how much thought you might put into answering such questions; to the extent that you have answers, you are biased.

The Future
American news media may or may not turn into a shopping mall of opinion. Most people will listen to what they like to hear, it seems, and there is a lot of money to be made gratifying them. On the other hand, most people like to think of themselves as moderates who base their opinions on objective facts, which they have to get from somewhere.

This is the real problem with editorial journalism: not simply that any given news source will never give you a clear picture of reality, but that no combination or aggregate of sources will ever give you a clear picture. A news media like that would decide truth the same way a fistfight does—with strength, speed and the support of friends.

Whether we’re headed for such a scenario or not, all Americans have to consider that more and more of our fellow citizens are receiving and believing information that merely reinforces their prejudices and fears. For the republic, that could be a big problem. For the future journalist? Two thoughts: