News media lost trust when it lost objectivity

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Leaders in the news media, an institution whose reputation has sunk near a record low, have a novel idea to restore public faith in their work: They can improve trust, they say, by renouncing objectivity. This is not something that would have occurred to me.

In a recent column in the Washington Post, the paper's former executive editor, Leonard Downie, says that in the quarter-century he was a top editor, he "never understood what 'objectivity' meant." The piece quotes other notable journalists saying much the same. "Objective by whose standard?" asks a former executive editor of the Associated Press.

Downie argues that "truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever 'objectivity' once meant to produce more trustworthy news."

More trustworthy news would certainly be good. In the 1970s some 70% of Americans said they trusted the mass media "a great deal" or "a fair amount" to "report the news fully, accurately and fairly." The figure now stands at 34%. Other polls report similar findings.

Admittedly, it isn't obvious what this decline really means. Are the media less worthy of trust, or are readers less trusting?

The issue isn't whether newspapers are seen to be neutral. It's fine, for instance, that the New York Times is a liberal paper. My career in journalism started in the U.K., which has brazenly partisan newspapers: You can't imagine the Guardian backing the Tories or the Telegraph supporting Labor. Again, that's fine.

But the proper and unashamed tilt of opinion writing and editorializing is, or should be, separate from whether reporting of news can be trusted.

I find that I read political news in the New York Times and Washington Post more cautiously than I used to. It isn't that I suspect outright, deliberate falsehoods. It's more that I see a pattern of choosing and framing narratives that downplay or omit things I have to learn elsewhere. The most obvious recent example was the effort to dismiss and then ignore the contents of what, in fact, turned out to be Hunter Biden's laptop. But I also detect a reluctance to discuss the pros and cons of measures to improve election integrity, interrogate the "settled science" of climate change, or present a thorough and dispassionate accounting of the policy response to the pandemic.

It's as if the lack of trust runs in both directions: News consumers can't be trusted with information that might lead to the wrong conclusion. This tendentious crafting of the news might be well-intentioned — in part a conscious effort, deemed necessary to cope with Donald Trump as candidate and president, to steer clear of "misinformation," "false equivalence" and "both-sidesism."

That said, I don't appreciate it, and it doesn't inspire confidence.

Jeff Gerth, a distinguished former reporter for the New York Times, recently produced a 24,000-word article for the Columbia Journalism Review, examining "the press vs. the president." His exhaustive account of the reporting of Russiagate and other Trump scandals fully supports his main conclusion — that "journalism's primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media's own lack of transparency about its work."

Striving to be objective in reporting news — a goal now openly disavowed by some of the profession's leading lights — has been one of those norms.

This rejection of objectivity would be easier to understand (albeit still wrong) if it were part of a larger skepticism about the possibility of "truth." Objectivity and truth, in the ordinary meaning of that term, stand or fall together. It's nonsense to want one but not the other.

Objectivity calls for detachment, for a relating of facts "uncolored by feelings, opinions or personal bias" (as my dictionary puts it). Downie and other doubters seem influenced by the school of thought that says it's impossible to report in such a way. Relating facts involves selecting, arranging and interpreting them. These processes and their outcomes, whether we're aware of it or not, are socially dependent, guided or even determined by outside factors. These might reflect one's "lived experience," as many now like to say, or the conditions of production, as Karl Marx argued, or systemic racism, according to critical race theory. At any rate, there can be no neutral or objective presentation of facts.

The trouble is, all these objections apply with equal force to "truth." If "objective by whose standard?" refutes objectivity as a principle, then "whose truth?" does the same for truth. There is no truth, only your truth and my truth. If, on the other hand, truth in the ordinary meaning of the term is possible, as most journalists still appear to believe, then it's capable of being sought, and there is something to be objective about.

Granted, a uniformly skeptical position — objectivity is meaningless and truth is socially constructed — would be a tremendous timesaver. All those fact-checking operations could be shut down because there are no actual facts, and suggesting otherwise might be seen as claiming (baselessly) that objectivity is possible. There'd be no point in counting Trump's thousands of lies because Trump's truth is simply different from yours and mine, and who's to say which is valid?

Alternatively, we could agree that there is such a thing as truth, and that striving to set the truth before readers is a vital public service. We could agree that politicians often tell lies and applaud reporters for exposing them. We could agree that getting to the truth is harder than it might seem, while still insisting it's worth the effort.

There's no question, for instance, that issues get neglected because readers prefer not to know, or have been taught not to care. America's racial history and its contemporary legacy is replete with such cases. But this filtering can be overcome — not by casting doubt on the idea of truth, but by insisting on it. We should want to talk about redlining and its consequences. And when we do, we should want to judge rival claims according to whether they're true or false, not by asking whose truth they express.

With that understood, striving for objectivity becomes an intelligible and essential ambition. And it serves two further purposes:

First, the discipline of suspending feelings, opinions and personal bias opens the mind, as Gerth puts it, to "facts that run counter to the prevailing narrative."

Second, it would give readers greater confidence in the news that's set before them.