In Defense of Objectivity
Thoughts On Objectivity
In both science, and journalism.
The notion that journalists are, or should be, or can be “objective” is perhaps the profession’s most fatal conceit. As Virginia Postrel says, what’s important is to be fair, something that they often don’t even attempt, as demonstrated by CNN and its performance in the debates.
I’m dubious. Even granting that “objective” is something of a term of art among journalists that doesn’t quite correspond to what a philosopher or scientist might mean in terms of attempting to avoid prejudice, bias, or wishful thinking, I don’t see how you can aim at fairness without first being able to assess what parts of your reporting might be unfair. And to do that, it seems to me you have to try to be objective…unless you’re just going to reduce everything to a procedure, as in “he said; she said” journalism.
From my point of view, the problem isn’t that journalists try to be objective where they should be trying to be fair–it’s that they’re so damn bad at objectivity. And it doesn’t reassure me that fairness over objectivity would be an improvement when the biggest critics of objectivity as a journalistic goal (e.g. Chomsky) want to downplay it precisely so they can hide their biases and better achieve their agendas. “Fake but accurate” is exactly what that approach is trying to legitimize. It is unfair that the journalist can’t present what he knows to be true based on his expert judgment, just because there’s no actual “objective” evidence. But because journalistic standards still require objectivity, he supplies fake evidence (and maybe even believes it to be true because of his biases), and with luck gets caught out. I say that if you believe that the journalist is obligated to provide the actual documents for other people to examine, and not just assert that they exist, you believe in objectivity not fairness; you believe that there is a truth of the matter that can be gotten at through examination of the evidence*, and not just a requirement to announce your biases.
Rand Simberg’s post above is in reference to a Virginia Postrel post on Objectivity. I haven’t read the book, but to infer anything about the appropriateness of objectivity as an epistemic virtue from a discussion of its history is to commit the genetic fallacy. I’m not at all sure whether the Daston and Gallison, the authors of Objectivity, would agree with Postrel’s take-away that “Real objectivity would turn the journalist into a C-Span camera, simply recording data without any sort of selection or pattern-making,” but I am sure that it is a core epistemic virtue for journalists to start by simply recording the data without any sort of selection or pattern-making. As the folks at Language Log have demonstrated over and over and over again, if you want the truth you have first accurately record what really was said. That doesn’t mean that you end there, and the journalist’s job is just to faithfully transcribe and then print it–but it has to start there.
* if it can be gotten at at all…