“All the News That’s Fit to Print!”
The New York Time’s baffling motto and the myth of objective journalism.
It has been a while since I picked up a copy of the Times, but whenever I log into their website, I am greeted by the satisfaction that most people don’t have to be witnesses to the most dumbfounding motto,
“All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
My blood pressure rises, no doubt. As Hitchens wrote in Letters to a Young Contrarian, “why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it is as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be.”
Why, indeed, does the New York Times insist on carrying on printing the line?
If there are news that are ‘fit to print’, as the Times seems to suggest theirs is, then there must be somewhere news that are not fit to print. The question of what qualifies or not as ‘proper’ journalism is a serious one. During the brief time I spent in J-school, one of the recurring topics of focus was that of “fake news” and misinformation. The expression “fake news” is, in all of its Trumpist boorishness, nonsensical. If it is fake then it is not news. Always mind the language– sloppiness drags itself under our stupefied noses like it is no one’s business.
What is, then, the categorical distinction that makes something ‘fit’ to print? Is the Times suggesting that their stories meet some sort of quality standard? In which case, the Times slaps unto the heading of each A1 page they print a self conceited– “we do our job as we ought to”.
To say that the news are ‘fit’ however, drags the full implications of the word. Something fit, especially at the time the phrase was coined, also meant that it was ‘proper’. I am not in the business of speculating, but you can be a hell of a lot less ambiguous with your language– especially considering it is a damn paper.
In any case, the Times continues to print it. The covenant that the paper strikes with its reader is admirable in sentiment only. Adolph Simon Ochs adopted the line in 1896, but also refused to print adds he considered in poor taste. I suppose PR is PR in any decade, but I digress. The moralizing thread I try to tug at is not conclusive, but it is what I gape at while the central question of this commentary remains unanswered– what exactly is fit to print?
The journalistic practices of the Times are, no doubt, brilliant. However, journalism is story telling. If the format of the story is ‘fit’, I suppose that it is reasonable to say then that the paper has met some sort of standard. However, how does the Times, and indeed any journalist, determine the fitness of a subject?
Let’s expand the scope of this examination to journalism as a whole. What subjects are worthy to be covered by reporters? In J-school I was taught that successful reports were stories that convinced an editor of their worthiness. How the editor decided on their fitness was, generally speaking, “learned tacitly”. The first principles of journalism, then it seems, are intuitive– christ.
We were also offered the SIN test, which was supposed to help us gauge the fitness of a pitch. SIN stands for significant, interesting, and new. The test very quickly fell short for me, as I experienced my first encounters with student newspapers. My pitch on political polarization in the United States– the, for better or worse, still reigning superpower– was somehow not as significant to the student population as was a review of the latest blockbuster. My piece on Ouija boards did just fine, though.
Similar devices were offered to us. For example, PRINT: Proximity, rareness (they didn’t even try to hid the market’s hand here), importance (the textbook read: “important’ suggests elected officials… even celebrities”), newness, and tension (the textbook read: “readers are drawn to stories that involve some kind of dramatic tension”). What is significant was afterwards left in vague terms of social service and a nebulous responsibility to the public.
Indeed, many people who I met in school were in the business, (for a business it is), of journalism out of a sense of duty or moral obligation. The idea of ‘Public Service journalism’ was thrown around. However, the concept is simply a re-phrasing of the ‘fourth estate’ theory. Socially minded journalism manages to somehow avoid that most dreaded talk– that of the establishment of first principles; an undertaking which makes bi-partisans and “unity” politicians tremble.
‘Objective’ journalism suffers from the burden of all politics– it is meant to know what is best, what is fit, what by necessity is a public service. There is however, many, many, many disagreements over what is right for a society and its government. If your editor is a bleeding heart libertarian and you are a lenient socialist, then it doesn’t matter how much you can see eye to eye when it comes to the use of commas or the treatment of sources or the details that should be included in a nut-graph; when it comes time to decide what subjects are fit for a story, there will be differences of opinion.
Our obsession with ‘objectivity’ has cost us our moral spine. You may report a story objectively, if that is possible at all, but your editorial decisions on what stories to report betray ideology and obvious incentives. The means may be immaculate, but it is the end that I am concerned with. Declare your politics at the door, and how exactly your evaluation of worth-value fits to that end, or get rid of such a ridiculous slogan.
Blatantly political papers are, I think, much more admirable than papers who advertise objectivity. I much rather have editorial choices be made ideologically than by the incentive of such wonderfully economic ‘impartial’ indicators such as rareness and conflict. Don’t insult me with an incomplete thought– according to who, through which methods, and to what ends, are your news fit to print?
