{"id":10483,"date":"2018-12-03T11:27:20","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T19:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=10483"},"modified":"2018-12-03T11:27:20","modified_gmt":"2018-12-03T19:27:20","slug":"journalism-is-never-objective-on-the-ideology-of-news-media-objectivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2018\/12\/03\/journalism-is-never-objective-on-the-ideology-of-news-media-objectivity\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalism Is Never Objective: On the Ideology of News-Media Objectivity"},"content":{"rendered":"
JOHN LAURITS<\/a>\u00a0(johnlaurits.com)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\n

\"What<\/p>\n

Analysis of the major news-media\u2019s declining credibility tends to revolve around the idea that objective journalism is being drowned out by foreign propaganda and \u2018fake news\u2019 spread by an inexhaustible legion of useful idiots via social-media. Though Democrats and Republicans disagree over whether it was the fault of Russians or the liberal elite, both narratives are unified by a singular premise that non-objective news has made it too hard for the stupid public to recognize the objective news. Of course, this assumes that such a thing as \u2018objective journalism\u2019 exists and that should raise the question \u2014\u00a0is there such a thing as objectivity in journalism?<\/em>\u00a0Where exactly is the line and, more importantly, who gets to draw the line between objective and non-objective news? And does journalistic objectivity even matter if enough of us just dispute the media that displeases us regardless of (alleged) objectivity?<\/p>\n

Does Journalistic Objectivity Exist?<\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cThe imaginary and the rational-the visionary and objective vision \u2014 hover close together\u201d
\n\u2013 Donna Haraway<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most would agree that some kinds of information like measurements, records, and events that either\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0did not<\/em>\u00a0occur are inherently objective enough to be communicated without much risk of misleading others. This would generally include any information available in public records \u2014 like the fact that Chuck Schumer received\u00a0$102,988 in contributions<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0from weapons giant Lockheed-Martin in 2018 \u2014 and measurements like that\u00a0Three Mile Island<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is just 2.5 miles long, as well as historical events like the fact that\u00a0the Allied Powers turned down a proposal by Stalin to attack Hitler before WWII on August 15th<\/sup>, 1939. Since numbers, dates, events, and the like can be verified not just by other journalists but by virtually anyone, this sort of objectivity is least problematic. Factual accuracy must obviously be a minimum requirement for media to even be considered as journalism but accuracy in fact, in itself, is hopelessly inadequate as a standard of journalistic objectivity or the credibility of news because media, as it actually exists, is never a raw feed of carefully-labeled numeric data.\u200b..<\/p>\n

The Poverty of Factual Accuracy<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Not only does factual accuracy fail to account for most facets of real media, facts that are technically correct can be (and frequently\u00a0are<\/em>) used to support conclusions based on faulty reasoning. As an example, it would be technically correct to report that rates of shark attacks\u00a0rise<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0along with revenue from ice-cream sales and, by the simple omission of further context, that might imply that sharks like the taste of people who eat frozen-treats or that Big Ice-Cream is terrorizing the public with sharks. None of the facts in such a report would be false and yet clearly it would be just as untrustworthy as any \u2018fake news\u2019 story based on mistaken or made-up \u201cfacts.\u201d That, of course, is a very simple, silly example but it serves to illustrate that, however accurate or verifiable or numerous, the facts are still a house of cards that is always one case of bad reasoning away from ruin.<\/p>\n

\"Graphic:<\/a><\/p>\n

But factual accuracy\u2019s inadequacy becomes even more palpable considering that facts can be used to distort reality as easily as they can be used to communicate it. In the wrong hands, this sort of factual quackery can be tailored to suit just about any narrative as Zachary Goldfarb demonstrates in an article that appeared in the Washington Post, titled\u00a0How We Misread the Numbers That Dominate Our Politics<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 :<\/p>\n

I want to tell you the story of a president [who] came into office during a massive financial crisis, with the economy losing 800,000 jobs per month, and he turned things around. He created more than 5 million new jobs and saved the jobs of teachers who were at risk of being laid off. The manufacturing industry roared back, adding 460,000 workers. And after its worst decline ever, the housing market started to rebound, with home prices rising and the government helping millions of people avoid foreclosure.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019d like to tell you the story of another president [who] also came into office during a massive crisis, but he hardly made things better. He created just 325,000 jobs over his term. More than 100,000 teachers were laid off, while the manufacturing industry lost 635,000 positions. Home prices slumped to a nine-year low, and 3 million homes went into foreclosure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"How<\/a>
A simple graphic summary of confirmation bias<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In both cases, the president in question is Barack Obama and, in both cases, the facts are accurate but each of these equally factual accounts conjures a reality that antagonizes the other. In these, as well as other useful examples in his article, Goldfarb shows just how strikingly malleable fact-based \u2018objectivity\u2019 can become in the insidious\u00a0presence of\u00a0confirmation bias<\/strong><\/a><\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0attribution errors<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(i.e. did the president affect the jobs of millions all by himself or were other factors at play too?). None of this is to say that facts are unimportant, of course. The point is that factual accuracy can\u2019t even prove instances of news are more than literal nonsense, much less whether the news is objective or trustworthy.<\/p>\n

Scientific Objectivity<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n

\"Sensory<\/a>Physics<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 arguably the most objective field there is \u2014 provides another good reason to be skeptical of journalistic objectivity. Among scientists who study subatomic particles, it is common knowledge that, as far as physicists can tell, it seems to be impossible to observe anything at all without interacting with it and, even if only very slightly, changing it. This is because of how perception works. When vision appears in the eye, it is no magical streaming-service but light particles rapidly striking the retina in specific patterns determined by the geometry of surfaces off which the light is scattering. And not only is this how vision works but\u00a0also scientific instruments<\/strong><\/a>\u2014 telescopes, microscopes, or the like may alter the input and expensive widgets like electron-microscopes can even re-create the process with machine-like precision but, in the end, all of it is still just photons running into stuff. Ultimately, to see any part of reality, someone somewhere needs to hurl at least one photon right into its face. And the same basic thing applies to the other senses.<\/p>\n

For scientists, this is no problem \u2014 the obvious solution is simply to acknowledge the subject\u2019s impact on the object so that measurements can be corrected accordingly. But if so many rigorous scientists can freely admit that even the most empirical disciplines fall short of true objectivity, how can anchors and journalists claim to be anywhere near it?<\/p>\n

The Myth of Objective News-Media<\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cWhen a saint walks by, the pickpocket sees only pockets\u201d \u2013 Old Saying<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The more fundamental issue with journalistic objectivity, however, is that the very act of selecting what news to report is irreversibly enmeshed in a journalist\u2019s subjective experience. This article, for instance, is about the nature of objectivity in news media but \u2014 if its author were, say, a Californian living in Ventura County \u2014 then, the 100K acres lost to the\u00a0Woolsey Fire<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0would easily have seemed to be a more pressing topic and \u2014 if the author\u2019s parents had been Honduran emigrants \u2014 he might have selected Trump\u2019s present fiasco at the southern border as a topic instead.<\/p>\n

To report something as news is always to also assert that a thing is important and worthy of being reported. Outside a small array of world-historical events that hold a universal importance that is likely to trump other headlines (think:\u00a0world war, huge natural disaster, alien invasion, etc<\/em>), the immense majority of news stories possess only a limited and\u00a0subjectively-determined<\/em>\u00a0importance. Despite a near-universal awareness of the profound non-importance of celebrity gossip found in rags like\u00a0US Weekly<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0People<\/em>\u00a0magazine, the fact of its existence is points to the existence of groups of people\u00a0with definite interests in asserting such media\u2019s importance. The existence of media devoted to fashion, finance, travel, etc., all reveal the existence of classes with enough money and leisure time to buy fancy clothes, invest, or take vacations and, in turn, the many forms of media in its totality reveals an intersectional kaleidoscope of class-interests that are served by each.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0<\/u>Irrevocably<\/u>\u00a0Subjective Perspective of Class, Race, etc.<\/u><\/em><\/h3>\n

\"Intersectionality<\/a>The flip-side, of course, is that stories with incredible importance for marginalized communities are only rarely considered \u2018worthy\u2019 of attention. Take what happened to water-protectors at Oceti Sakowin and other camps on\u00a0unceded territory at Standing Rock<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0during 2016 and \u201817. The indifference of most news-outlets in regards to those events was not so much an issue of non-objectivity or inaccuracy as an instance of the\u00a0commentariat<\/em>\u00a0and career-political class simply neglecting a story that was outside \u2014 and, in a lot of ways,\u00a0in conflict with<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 their collective interest. Meanwhile, national newspapers kept printing whole sections of news about the stock market and nevermind that nearly 90% of all value in stocks is held by just 10% of everyone because those who own and manage news-firms genuinely cannot imagine what it is like not to care \u2014\u00a0to have no reason to care<\/em>\u2014 about stocks.<\/p>\n

Subjectivity, Objectivity, & Totality in News Media<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

To fully understand what is happening when objectivity is asserted in media, it is necessary to look at the greater context that objectivity relates to. In broad terms, a person is considered \u201cobjective\u201d to the extent that she has severed herself from all subjective relation to the question at hand. In other words, an objective viewpoint is supposed to stand over, above, and outside the object of investigation. From the objective point of view, the world is presumed to appear\u00a0as it would appear<\/em>\u00a0if there was no person to subjectively experience it, which is to say that a perspective of objectivity can only exist under conditions that are not just sanitized of meaning and incoherent by definition but impossible to boot.<\/p>\n

In the case of news media, the object (ostensibly) is society itself, its internal motions of development, and its relations to forces external to society. An objective news-media would then look something like field-notes taken by a dispassionate alien observer documenting events from a vantage-point beyond the petty concerns of human and social existence. With that in mind, the question of whether\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>,\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>,\u00a0Reuters, et al<\/em>\u00a0makes the cut is barely worth asking and the idea that a particular journalist or editorial board (or anyone, for that matter) is meaningfully nearer to such a real objectivity than the rest is not just stupid but arrogantly so.<\/p>\n

Death to Objectivity, Long Live Situated Knowledges!<\/em><\/h2>\n

\u201cMy relation to my environment is my consciousness\u201d
\n\u2013 Karl Marx<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But given how absurd it is to ask subjective fragments for an objective image of the social whole, what then for journalism \u2014 ? Is news media doomed to slosh around the tepid swamp of relativism, eternally frustrated by an utter void of certainty in a postmodern hellscape? Not exactly. It is not just valid but useful and necessary to distinguish accurate from inaccurate news-media but to claim greater objectivity beyond matters of fact is ultimately rooted in the appeal to spooky authority. In her\u00a01988 essay on the topic<\/a><\/strong>, feminist scholar Donna Haraway identifies this as a \u201cconquering gaze from nowhere,\u201d arguing that notions of \u2018scientific objectivity\u2019 tend to privilege the views of dominant social-classes at the expense of others and that objectivity could be more usefully re-framed in terms of\u00a0situated knowledge<\/em>. \u201cThe moral is simple,\u201d Haraway explains, \u201conly partial perspective promises objective vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe \u2018eyes\u2019 made available in modern technological sciences [telescopes, electron microscopes, et cetera<\/em>] shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that\u00a0all eyes, including our own organic ones, are\u00a0active perceptual systems<\/em>, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life\u201d [emphasis mine -JL]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rather than abstracting a disfigured reality\u00a0as it would be<\/em>\u00a0under imagined objective conditions \u2014 that is, conditions, which above all should\u00a0never<\/em>\u00a0actually be observed \u2014 valid observations and analyses can be engaged as\u00a0knowledges<\/em>that are\u00a0situated<\/em>\u00a0in shifting social, economic, and historical edifice. To access more rigorous analyses of media, critical thinkers must abandon the indefensible idea that factual instances of media somehow possess unequal\u00a0yet non-measurable<\/em>\u00a0claims to objectivity.<\/p>\n

The concept of objectivity is valid in fields of study that work with abstraction intentionally like philosophy and epistemology \u2014 but the concept is dysfunctional when applied in fields that are practical, social, material,\u00a0human<\/em>. Approaching media as a constellation of what Haraway\u2019s essay describes as \u201cdetailed, active, partial\u00a0way[s] of organizing worlds<\/em>\u201d makes everyone who participates in making or presenting knowledge \u201canswerable for\u00a0what we learn how to see.<\/em>\u201d Rather than taking the uncritical relativist approach of liberal trash-philosophers who legitimize every opinionated bumper-sticker as part of a rainbow of equally valid views, instances of media can be taken as narratives that are situated at definite locations in history and class-society.<\/p>\n

CONCLUSION<\/u>?<\/i><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Pundits, journalists, and media executives alike exist as living, breathing intersections of social class, sex, race, and nationality that shape the narrative they present and, insofar as a story is\u00a0accurate in fact and in good faith, all of this should enrich and contextualize the story, not compromise it. Approaches that exclusively seek the \u2018objective\u2019 minimize, erase, and dismiss all of this critically enriching information as subjective waste-matter that is, at best, irrelevant. But even more interesting is how convenient this is for those privileged few who never want to discuss things like inequality, systemic racism and sexism, worker exploitation, the literal fact\u2020 that capitalist vampire-squids are sucking out the planet\u2019s insides, or other things that might disrupt the stasis of the present order.<\/p>\n

The last thing to understand is that there is no conclusion here \u2014 or at most, a partial one\u00a0\u2014 because anything else would miss the point, which is that\u00a0real understanding never concludes<\/em>. To conclude is to circumscribe\u00a0the Narrative, to define the limits of what is true and valid, and to say that no more needs to be included because what is essential has already been stated. And objectivity \u2014 that conquering gaze from nowhere \u2014 is just a spectre often invoked to imbue these conclusions with an air of authority and finality that neither privilege nor complacency deserves.<\/p>\n

In solidarity,
\n<\/em>John Laurits<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DECEMBER 2, 2018JOHN LAURITS\u00a0(johnlaurits.com) Analysis of the major news-media\u2019s declining credibility tends to revolve around the idea that objective journalism is being drowned out by foreign propaganda and \u2018fake news\u2019 spread by an inexhaustible legion of useful idiots via social-media. Though Democrats and Republicans disagree over whether it was the… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10483"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10484,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10483\/revisions\/10484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}