Objective journalism is not!

Reading the ABC’s Alan Sunderland commenting on objective journalism had me struggling to make out what it was he was trying to say.

More particularly, he seemed to be fudging what journalism has been and is becoming.

Sunderland has been associated with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the migrant-focused Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) for his entire professional career, and he is now the ABC’s ‘head of editorial policy’. If someone in public broadcasting should know something about journalism, he should be near the top of the list.

Granted he was editorialising, but he did bury the lead to his opinion piece, if there was a lead at all. He failed to define his terms, and came across like a bureaucrat, carefully obfuscating the nominated subject area.

First, the terms ‘journalism’ and ‘reporting’ seem to be used synonymously, when historically and functionally they never were, and should not now be. Journalists investigate events and issues, and inform readers. The best of them use creative, literary flair in doing so, and often produce long-form articles or documentaries. Reporters are usually exactly the stenographers listing unexplained information Sunderland says they should not be. They report information presented to them, or events they observe as directly as circumstances dictate. By that I mean they do not instigate their own ‘stories’, and often do not get close enough to events to report on more than their own impressions, or those of more direct witnesses (as might be the case in corruption, crime, disaster, or war reporting). The best of them discriminate on emphasis and credibility of sources, but rarely explain or interpret what they serve us as reportage. The worst of them merely report what they are handed as press releases or other prepared materials.

This character of reporting is what is mistaken as ‘objective’ by people who ignore the subjectivity of selecting what to report on, which aspects to report as opposed to those aspects not reported, and the assortment of tricks that are commonly used to slant an apparently objective report to a particular point of view. A recent and very prominent example of this is NPR ‘reporter’, Mara Liasson, who managed to cover Democrat primary campaigning in the USA without mentioning Bernie Sanders, whose polling numbers defy relegating him to the status of insignificant. It turns out, despite assurances to the contrary, that she has significant motive to misrepresent political coverage because of her commitments to the extreme Right-aligned Fox propaganda network.

Sunderland might also care to reflect on the relatively easy ride his ABC has afforded the ALP’s Bill Shorten since the unresolved allegations of voting fraud that elevated him to be Labor leader, but including especially some quite damaging allegations about his links to a culture of bullying and corruption in unions.

Sunderland says real journalists ‘sift through facts, weigh them up, make editorial judgements about their relative strength and importance, and then present them in a way that illuminates the truth of a matter’. That’s almost an admission that journalists determine veracity and truth. How that can possibly be objectivity has me baffled.

It is also a distortion of what journalism has been, and lays claims to. As the name itself suggests, journalism was developed as a form of descriptive prose in journals, meaning regular publications. In Anglophone history, this development began with the rise of the printing press, and might be thought to have originated with the English weekly, A Current of General News, in the 17th century, but certainly with the rise of pamphleteering in the later 17th century, and throughout the 18th century. The writing in such regular and occasional publications was overtly political, covering economic, religio-ethical, and social issues, largely from the perspective of uneducated labourers, artisans, and the emerging middle class. The idea that news reportage should not contain any sort of slant is a naïve and idealistic misrepresentation of how news media have always worked, and continue to work. What has undoubtedly changed is that the concentration of news media corporations has made their focus change from representing working and middle class people to quite often being little more than corporate propaganda organs, staffed by people apparently incapable of journalism.

In Sunderland’s case, he ought to ask himself whether the ABC’s long-term flirtation with uncritical advocacy for minority ‘disadvantage’ or ‘rights’ is really objective when it comes to a statistically representative breakdown of the Australian population, which funds the public broadcaster. Likewise, he might consider how it is that the ABC is so shy (or incapable) of presenting incisive economic analysis of contemporary trends in political economy to explain who benefits from what policies, and who pays for that benefit.

In this vein, Sunderland’s editorial appears to gloss over the difficulty of defining objectivity or truth in journalism. How do human beings externalise reporting on what matters that also affect them directly and indirectly? How do they switch off a lifetime’s personal perspectives, biases, prejudices, and intuitions? That would, in effect, require them to not be journalists rather than automatons. Critical thinking and evaluation requires judgement, which is by its very nature subjective. Journalists who pretend this isn’t the case are lying, and automatically disqualify themselves from being trustworthy about their professional practice.

Likewise, truth, as an absolute, requires the idea that ‘reality’ is a fixed given that can be determined like a mathematical equation. In most human, social circumstances that is just wishful thinking. There is nothing at all objective about politics, political economy, or social issues. Even in the professions Sunderland cites — sciences, jurisprudence, and law enforcement — there is plenty of room for purely subjective assessments. For example, if a climate change scientist advocates for a carbon tax, what is the objective link between the evidence for man-made climate change, and the efficacy of a tax to address that change for the better? Or, when a judge (with or without a jury) finds an accused guilty of murder, the truth of that guilt is never objectively established rather than becoming a matter of legal ‘management’ or convenience.

In the case of journalism/reporting, Sunderland avoids such distinctions and simply asserts that making editorial judgements is a definitive part of objective reporting.

It doesn’t involve abandoning a commitment to impartiality and following your own whims and preoccupations. Nor does it involve handing out undigested facts by the truckload and leaving a bewildered audience to try and make sense of it.

What it does involve is gathering information without fear or favour, weighing and assessing that information and then reaching a conclusion based on the evidence. It involves a conscious and disciplined process where the evidence is not misrepresented or suppressed if it doesn’t suit a preconceived opinion. A process where the reporter examines and challenges his or her own assumptions and blind spots as well as everyone else’s.

What he appears to be saying here is that journalism is in fact critical analysis. There doesn’t seem to be too much of that going on in most mainstream journalism, but even where it is, it cannot be objective. By definition critical analysis has to give greater weight to facts and arguments judged to be of greater merit, and judgement is always subjective.

There are only two methods for contradicting this simple reality. One is ideological or religious determinism that demands ultimate causes and effects — as articles of faith, meaning to the exclusion of any proof however convincing. The other is a technocratic determinism that mistakes scientific method as being capable of delivering objective truths rather than a continuum of improving methods for understanding how quantifiable things might work.

Sunderland’s piece trails out in a couple of paragraphs of meaningless puffery that left me wondering whether he conceived of his audience, originally The Age newspaper in Melbourne, as simple-minded idiots, or whether he was exhibiting a remarkable shallowness of mind for a senior journalist and head of policy.

One of the lacunæ in his piece is an entirely topical one: the increasing tendency for especially broadcast reporters to devise ‘gotcha’ questions whose sole intent is to trap public figures into making self-incriminating, embarrassing, or controversial statements. This practice, becoming more and more frequent, including at the ABC, is a deliberate attempt to deliver sordid spectacle, not news or commentary. It has more in common with trash-talking reality TV than journalism. Not that journalists shouldn’t ask hard questions, or cut short waffle that avoids meaningful answers, but the two tactics are easy to distinguish. The reason I mention gotcha journalism is instrumental in my conception of what quality journalism once was, and could be again. Instead of focusing on catching people out as the main event, the reporter should ask tough questions, and report any attempt at obfuscation or failure to answer as exactly that. News and analysis should be informed as much by how journalists approach their subjects, and how they are treated, as by the information they convey to their audiences.

In my conception of journalism, there is no room for stenography reporting. No matter what the time constraints for broadcast journalists, or the necessity for maintaining open access to information by not publishing unfavourable coverage of politicians or corporations, journalists exist to identify issues of public importance, to investigate those issues, including seeking the views of people who exercise influence and power, and then to analyse by independent and rigorous critical assessment what the issue really is (as opposed to just repeating someone else’s definition), and whether there are inconsistencies between what is being said and what is being done.

To illustrate this in terms of two topics with long-term topical interest in the Anglophone world, the wars on drugs and terror, journalists have largely failed to discover root causes or the reasons for costly and continuing failures in both domains.

The war on drugs is in fact a political decision to maintain and increase artificial and massive profitability for drugs not patented by pharmaceutical corporations. That decision makes a nonsense of the idea of a war on anything but citizen users of recreational drugs, and instead reveals the inevitable redistribution of enormous sums of taxpayer dollars to law enforcement, the legal system, gaols (especially those run for profit), and entire public bureaucracies as self-interested empires, but also as the focal points of massive corruption fueled by, and fueling drug smuggling and sales. Journalists have largely failed to identify the issue as a prohibition on economic goods for which there is a demand by a large enough number of citizens to make it illogical to maintain such a prohibition … unless, of course, the intent always was to fuel corruption and artificially inflate prices.

The war on terrorism is a similarly ill-conceived euphemism for exerting military force against anyone who does not agree with Anglo-American foreign policy. As such it might be better defined as an ambition to legitimise the trans-legal power to hunt and kill real and imaginary enemies of imperial interests. However, it is actually worse than that. Most of the supposed terrorists today were manufactured by the imperial policies of yesterday, and will give way to the terrorism of the future as a byproduct of the unchanged, short-sighted, and plainly stupid imperial policies of today. To make war should consist of setting clear objectives for victory conditions, going after those objectives with brutal indifference to political whim, and then exiting with a strategy that has regard to not having to fight that war again in coming decades. So, the war on terror should be re-named as distinct and separate pieces of foreign policy, identified as either aimless and bound to fail for that lack of focus, or as targeted and likely to succeed on the basis of stated objectives and actions that bear out the words.

But such critical analysis is almost absent in contemporary journalism, which mostly offers up uncritical repetition of official propaganda. My conclusion is that if there are failings in contemporary journalism, they relate to the unwillingness or inability to present critical analysis. A kind of analysis that does not pretend at objectivity when this is plainly impossible, but that does at least offer analysis rather than regurgitation. Instead of pretending at a faux objectivity, what journalists can and should do is expose their frameworks of reference, so that their patrons can make their own assessments about how they came to their conclusions about by which trails of information.

I’m slowly re-reading Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, which was a big influence on me as a fledgling journalist back in the 1980s. Thompson never made any pretense at objectivity, referring to himself as a direct participant in the events on which he wrote, and frequently telegraphing that he was inserting stream of consciousness invention into his narratives, albeit always to make larger points about ultimate meanings. I doubt too many people today would be paid by newspapers, periodicals, or broadcasters to do anything quite so literary and Zeitgeist-oriented, but my point is not to laud Thompson, merely to explain that he became a figurehead of the 1950s and ‘70s New Journalism because he wore his subjectivity on his sleeve, making it easy to distinguish between intensely personal views and starkly impartial ones.

By stuffily repressing such independence and experimental approaches, most corporate news have signalled not a more sober and mature approach, but rather an iron control over what may be said, and how it may phrased. In short, the exclusion of subjectivity, and the faux virtue of ‘objectivity’ is actually cover for presenting propaganda as news or journalism.

It seems to me, too, that a shift in demographics has re-fashioned news and current affairs patrons into less vigorous thinkers, and more entertainment-focused ‘consumers’, who don’t see any lasting value in being informed. It seems to be a view that today’s information, like the wrapper of a cheeseburger, can be discarded casually because it has no meaning tomorrow. This might be said particularly of people on the extreme Right of the political spectrum, and, oddly, of a large number of Millennials, who sometimes combine youth and extreme Right political conceptions mostly founded on bottomless ignorance and an inexplicably narcissistic, solipsistic Weltanschauung. Feeding their appetites is not journalism. If that means journalism is dying, so be it. Let’s not dignify, though, any attempt to cater to such shallowness of mind by calling it journalism.

If my prescription for what is, and is not, journalism is too vague to satisfy those people who get twitchy when they can’t neatly label something and follow a formula, let me propose a very simple test: follow the money. Any reporter who can expose the flow of money that underlies all human affairs has come pretty close to journalism. All that’s left after identifying who’s being robbed for whose benefit is to analyse what that means to a larger audience, such as international or national populations, or minority groups. A distinct advantage, after these two pre-requisites of flow of money and who’s affected are taken care of is an ability to use language with literary flair, to add that extra readability or sympathy for the potential lyrical flow of words that distinguishes its practitioners as masters of their craft. That’s journalism. And objectivity be damned.

[From Minority Reports at http://peterstrempel.com/2015/09/11/objective-journalism-is-not/]