In "Say Everything", Scott Rosenberg devotes a chapter to the tensions between journalists and bloggers. The ideals of balance and objectivity--cornerstones of empirical rationalism--were among the sticking points. Journalists held themselves up as champions of neutrality and painted bloggers as screeching partisans. But on page 290, Rosenberg makes an interesting historical point: journalistic neutrality was a business decision.
"Yellow journalism", as you might remember from your history classes, was unabashedly sensationalistic and pandering (favoring the lower classes). But by midcentury, expanding circulation forced newspapers to come up with a new business model: don't offend anyone. In the days of Hearst and Pulitzer, it was fine to be populist at the cost of offending elitists, but the later megapapers needed everyone's eyeballs.
The early practitioners, retraining themselves to tell both sides of a story, knew that this neutrality was a business decision. But to the next generation it became a religion. Perhaps it helped journalists find meaning in their work. Perhaps with the growth of American industry during and after World War II, and the acceleration of technology, the public placed more faith in a scientific worldview.
That scientific worldview was itself born for other purposes. Early Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire were firstly against superstition and only secondly in favor of logic. Sickened by millenia of religious wars, they wanted to free people from control by self-interested authorities and give them tools to decide how to run their own lives. Empiricism was just a handy tool.
Two centuries later, we hardly know any other way to think. Cause and effect are the bedrock of our worldview. It is the closest thing I have to a religion. I am the modern analogue to the late-twentieth-century reporter who thinks that to write is to write about both sides. But just because rationalism wasn't invented as an end unto itself doesn't mean I'll cast it aside. And just because journalistic objectivity was an accountant's idea doesn't mean it's a bad one.
I used to think, whenever I read a news story that had only one side that the reporter violated the sacred tenet of objectivity. But I evolved to the point where I questioned the value of that approach. Reporters and writers who never draw a conclusion really aren't doing the reader any service. Nobody comes out better informed when the reporter merely points out that this guy says this and that guy says that.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in there lies the truth. Do a good job of reporting and tell the reader what it is.....Sometimes there are multiple truths, but he said/he said is lazy reporting.
Yup. For some reason appearing to acknowledge 2 sides to every story confers credibility on the writer. I think academia is involved here as well. People associate balance with authority and institutional neutrality. Not that professors are neutral, but that's the reputation.
ReplyDeleteIt's almost a knee jerk reflex for some reporters to find a contrary argument to every piece of information. This has the damaging effect of creating the impression that even settled Science like evolution is somehow questionable.
Ross, I think the reflex to find two sides helps give the appearance that the reporter is synthesizing a conclusion, a new abstraction, out of multiple pieces of information. It probably feels more elevated than just parroting what others have said (in other words, "reporting").
ReplyDeleteDonna, I confess I'm a little surprised to be defending neutrality per se. When I tell stories, I have a very strong tendency to give only those details and sequence of events that support the conclusion I've already drawn. I do that because I like people to think I'm smart. But recently it was pointed out to me that this approach does the listener a disservice on several levels. First, it doesn't credit them with the intelligence to draw their own conclusions. Second, it denies them those details that seemed extraneous to me but that may lead their thinking in other directions. Third, it ignores the fact that everyone has their own history and expertise to provide a perspective that's different from the storyteller's.
Another approach is to tell all the details, without emphasis or preferential sequencing. This allows any interpretation, and broadens the field of further inquiry instead of closing the case. It's remarkably difficult, but useful.
Hi again Jeff:
ReplyDeleteI remember in my early reporting days I tried the approach of presenting all the facts with no emphasis or preferential sequencing.
Do you know what my editor said to me?
"We hired a reporter. Not a secretary."
That remark - made more than 25 years ago - stayed with me forever, obviously.