Having worked for almost half a year on my master’s thesis, I decided that it is high time to document and share my working process. Both for myself, so all the hours at my desk in Trondheim don’t feel as much as solitary work and instead I have to turn my free-floating thoughts into a somewhat definite form, but also for any potential readers that are interested in what I am up to these days. In this first of hopefully many entries, I will provide a short summary of what I want to achieve with my thesis and what existing issues I try to address. Even though I try to keep the tone a bit less academic than in the thesis itself, I won’t be able to get rid of scholarly language altogether without distorting the content or misrepresenting what I am doing (which is, after all, scholarly work).

Synopsis

My thesis in one paragraph: it caught my attention that in many scientific disciplines, the concept of objectivity has been questioned. Yet in the news industry the ideal of objective journalism still stands strong and is largely undisputed by serious practitioners – maybe it shouldn’t, considering the rise of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts.’ Still, my initial observation made me further engage with the scholarship on journalistic objectivity (shoutout to Steven Maras for his work Objectivity in Journalism), and I was able to identify some key issues that come with it – for example the question of what we consider a valid fact, or the consequences when a reporter hides behind the anonymous third person. As a way of addressing these issues, I then turn my attention to a genre you get when you combine literature + journalism, which equals = literary journalism. A reporter doing literary journalism has much greater freedoms in representing events, such as the use of metaphors, foreshadowing or stream of consciousness, yet their work is not an invention but still depicts things that happened out there in real life. Additionally, because they are not that constricted by predetermined forms, literary journalists often critically engage with their own biases, perspectives and reflect on the very writing itself. It is then my (preliminary) thesis that a reporter won’t be able to be completely neutral anyway. However, by acknowledging their bias, they at least give the reader the tools to better understand how their background has an influence on the text and why they took certain decisions. The two works I will analyze for that purpose are the contemporary non-fiction works Riding Towards Everywhere (2008) by William T. Vollmann and Afropean (2019) by Johny Pitts.

Does Objectivity Exist?

In traditional journalism, reporters try to detach themselves from what they see and instead describe the world in neutral terms. The focus on tangible facts instead of opinions and impressions aims to guarantee the reliability of a news article, because facts (they say) can’t be subjective. As a result, an article is maximally unbiased and therefore a trustworthy account of an event. However, both the idea of a fact, but also the apparent ‘view from nowhere’ the journalist takes in can raise some central issues – which I will address now.

In academic disciplines, the idea of the fact (and even that of reality!) have been questioned already in the 1960s by the postmodern thinkers. For example, in his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Thomas Kuhn famously introduced the notion of the paradigm shift in science. To him, the way science is done always depends on paradigms, which are “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.” In other words, for anything to be taken seriously in a scientific community, it must adhere to the practices that are given by the paradigm. For example, it might have been good scientific practice over a hundred years ago to use the tools of Newtonian physics to calculate things on an infinitesimal level, whereas today we have the field of quantum mechanics with its own set of rules and laws. As the example shows, these paradigms can change, and whereas before one way of doing science was appropriate, through a revolutionary alternative, a paradigm shift can occur and the earlier paradigm becomes obsolete. What is deemed a valid fact must therefore be seen in relation to the historically conditioned ways of knowing the world, as today’s science and paradigms might themselves be outdated in a few decades.

Hierarchy of Facts

Yet we don’t even need to go that far down the scholarly path, as it seems fair to say that some types of facts are by themselves less ambiguous than others. For example, if a statistic shows a 12 % rise in poverty levels, it is quite difficult to disagree that it shows a 12 % rise in poverty levels ( – it is a different question where the data comes from). On the other hand, if a reporter has a particular gut feeling while reporting on an issue, this is not really considered quantifiable data that can be presented as a fact. Similarly, a government statement is usually considered a more stable fact than, let’s say, an interview with an undocumented immigrant, as the former is associated with an institution we tend to trust (depending on who you ask and which country we are talking about) and that can be held accountable for everything they say, whereas we don’t know anything about the immigrant and they might not be locatable again to clarify their statements.

Blind Spot for Non-Facts

At last, a fast-paced event such as an accident can be observed and represented more easily than processes that go on over decades, like for example the rising of sea levels. Especially when dealing with the consequences of global exploitation and climate change for marginalized groups, scholar Rob Nixon argues, there is often at play a ‘slow violence.’ Slow violence is not “a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is focused around an event, bounded by time, and aimed at a specific body,” but because of its extension over long time periods and often intangible effects, it eludes the traditional news net. The larger point is then: some things can be observed and verified more easily and therefore turned into facts, whereas other impressions are too abstract and therefore disqualified – they don’t live up to journalism’s principle of objectivity which comes from a reliance on facts. This is not to deny that such ‘hard facts’ might indeed be more accurate. Instead, I want to draw attention to journalism’s blind spot for everything that does not fall into the category of fact. Since this is hardly acknowledged, traditional journalism then distorts our view of the world by creating a hierarchy of information that favors the verifiable and official at the costs of the short-lived and the marginalized.

‘The View from Nowhere’

The other issue that can be associated with traditional journalism is using ‘the view from nowhere,’ a term introduced by the philosopher Thomas Nagel and applied to journalism by writer Jay Rosen. While the exclusion of the journalist’s opinions should lead to a greater objectivity, I propose that this further misrepresent their involvement in the creation of a story. As a real person reporting on an issue, often the journalist cannot be an invisible observer but becomes part of an event and even influences it. For example, a journalist’s relationship with their sources can play an important role for the way they are used in an article. Similarly, by hiding their own opinions, a journalist does not give the reader the tools to better understand how some of their biases might subconsciously influence the text, or on whose terms they approach a topic. While such biases are often unavoidable, the fact-focused discourse of the news story unfortunately leaves little room to discuss how a specific framing of a topic influences the terms on which it is depicted. Instead, the absence of such a discussion implies that an article is unbiased while the very same biases can now fly in under the radar…  

That being said, I am aware that objective journalism is much more complex than I describe it here, and a focus on facts and the absence of the reporter are by far not the only things that distinguish it. However, my critique will serve as a convenient springboard for the following analysis:

How to Solve this?

Based on the identified deficiencies in traditional journalism – if one wants to call them that – I want to explore alternative ways of doing journalism that engage precisely with questions such as: what can we even know? is my truth the same as yours? what is the role of the reporter? how does their own standpoint influence what they see and what they report? As a theoretical tool to explore these questions, I found use both in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger and feminist standpoint theory, especially the writings of Sandra Harding. It remains to be seen whether I can combine the two different schools in any sensible way. Central to both approaches is that they focus on the experience of the individual person (instead of generalizing human experience) and draw attention to the ways in which knowledge itself is socially situated. By applying the theory to journalism, I will have the vocabulary to talk about how the journalist’s subjectivity conditions their unique being-in-the-world (a fancy coinage by Heidegger, which we can understand here as the way we see the world), but also how their social standing can grant them access to some types of knowledge while it denies them others. This is a lot of complex theory at once in a short paragraph, therefore I will leave it at that for now and return to it in a later entry. Until then, this article gives a neat introduction to standpoint epistemology by referencing the series The Office.

Self-Aware Journalism?

At last, in literary journalism I found a way of doing journalism that is particularly well suited for my analysis. The most notorious practitioner is probably Hunter S. Thompson, whose somewhat semi-autobiographic work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made it onto the cinema screens with Johnny Depp playing Hunter. Notoriously hard to define, literary journalist Tom Wolfe described it as journalism that “reads like a novel.” For the moment, that definition is good enough.

Central to my thesis is that many literary journalists are very self-conscious, discuss how their texts are constructed and in what ways their personality shaped their work. Thanks to the overt narration, the reader gets a very clear idea of a journalist’s biases and how they frame their experiences. While literary journalism is far from being an alternative to replace classic journalism, since it has its own shortcomings, I instead suggest that through the comparison we can reveal some of the underlying assumptions of objective journalism, plus offer an example how things could be done differently. And maybe, just maybe, some of its practices could in some way or another even be implemented in more mainstream journalism. After extensive research and reading through the canon of literary journalism, I eventually landed on two contemporary authors whose works are ideally suited for what I am trying to achieve: William T. Vollmann and Johny Pitts.

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If you made it through my rumblings, congratulations! I hope to publish another post that tackles the theoretical foundation soon, and will then follow up with post after post until the thesis leaves my computer and lands on my supervisors’ desk. Takk for meg!