In my last post, I introduced standpoint epistemology and mentioned how all kinds of knowledge have to be socially situated. The examples I used came mostly from a scientific field, as they were meant to show how scientists can be oblivious of their own biases. It is a common fallacy to assume that one’s knowledge claims are free of one’s positionality and that, like a God, one sees “everything from nowhere.”
But how should this matter for objective journalism, as journalists often try to provide just the facts and let people draw conclusions themselves? Well, a journalistic article is never just a bullet point list with bare facts, but the way a text is arranged, what language used, what type of information is included and excluded – all require decisions a journalist must take. A text is not an accurate copy of reality, but instead it is a mediation, a selective summary. Because, how can everything fit on half an A2 page? Just like all cultural forms, communication scholar David Eason argues, journalism is therefore a way of “organizing experience,” but it can’t an immediate depiction of reality.
The Decisions a Journalist Faces
The creator of a journalistic story faces a plentitude of decisions, yet this involvement is swept under the carpet. If you recall: through hiding the journalist’s opinions and influence on the creation of a story, the impression of a ‘view from nowhere’ emerges, and it seems that what’s on the page is not mediated but pops out of nowhere. Does the metaphor of the ‘view from nowhere’ not resemble what Haraway called the ‘God-trick’? Both the conventions of science and objective journalism enforce a tendency to ignore the involvement of the observer, and instead sell the result as a product that does not have a real, flesh-and-blood author that has their own life, education, views, biases and preferences. Because the form focuses on facts and hides the reporter, the objective journalist lacks the possibility to turn the attention to themselves, and as a result also the reader has little idea of how their background (or maybe also the newspaper’s position) can lead to a specific interpretation of reality. And just as I described regarding science in the last article, this fact-focused and non-reflective type of writing is not seen as situated knowledge but instead presented as common-sense. You can’t say too much against sticking to the facts it seems, can you?
Whose Facts Are You Using?
Well, I would say yes, you kind of can… Because what types of facts are you using? Whose facts? Think about it in this way. The normal workday for a newspaper is quite fast paced, as bunch of deadlines must be met and empty pages have to be filled. To successfully run the publication, journalists are therefore dependent on regular access to newsworthy events. And who could be a reliable provider of that? What about government sources that regularly release press releases about this and that, neatly packaged in a format that allows for easy publication? Or statements by important experts, large organizations, in short, people that call the shots? (Another issue would be the ready-made reports of political conflicts, natural catastrophes and more by news agencies like Reuters). This dependency leads to an over-accessing of these types of sources, which according to Todd Gitlin has the consequence that journalists “tend to be pulled into the cognitive worlds of their sources.”
That does not mean that journalists lack the willingness or the ability to critique and scrutinize the government. Rather, the exposure amplifies certain ways of thinking and seeing the world, for example more in economic than ethical terms, or more in a top-down than bottom-up perspective. And at the same time, the increased use of acclaimed, official sources comes at the cost of the marginalized voices, as the relative lack of engagement with minorities makes the journalist “desensitized to the voices and life-worlds of working-class and minority people.” Like a researcher that has become fixated on a particular method, also a journalist’s horizon is then limited by his daily encounters.
Plurality of Opinions or Fake Balance?
To be fair, objective journalism does its best to avoid biased reporting, for example by contrasting several viewpoints and thereby allowing different parties to express their opinion. Does this solve the issue? Also here, a closer analysis shows weaknesses. The cultural critic Stuart Hall suggests that the preference that is usually given to one of the sources (just think about: who gets to speak first?) turns them into “primary definers of topics.” The primary definer establishes the terms for the ensuing debate – all arguments “against a primary interpretation are forced to insert themselves into its definition of what is at issue.”
Take this simple example I just made up. A new law was introduced, and in response demonstrations were organized that at times got out of hand and turned violent. If you interview the city administration, they might highlight the security aspect and want to ensure the safety of its people. When the protestors are given a voice in response, they might say that not all of them are violent and that they just exert their right of freedom of expression. But since the primary definer, in this case the city council, has defined this as a safety issue, the latter barely have the chance to express the political demands, ideals and motives for the protest. Even though they are given a voice, they must react to an issue that was framed by the primary definer. And since the journalists are supposed to stay in the background and not voice their own opinions, they themselves have relatively little freedom to intervene and question how something is framed. Thus, Hall argues that objectivity “distances the reporter from the ideological content of the material he is handling and the inflexion of the codes he is employing.” In conclusion, we can then say (admittedly quite cynically) that the juxtaposition of different sources leads to a skewed balance at best, and a distraction of who in fact frames an event at worst.
But What About Facts?
If we dig down the rabbit hole even deeper… What if even facts aren’t just this stable container of meaning but themselves quite biased? In my introductory post I suggested that some types of information can more easily be observed, verified, and represented on paper than others, and are thus more likely to be seen as a fact. Compare a car accident on the one hand, with the slow and much more subtle effects of poverty on the other. Thus, some observations can be turned into facts, whereas other impressions are abstract and easily disqualified by journalism’s principle for objectivity.
The Journalist as a Flesh-and-Blood Person
We all know that it is a real person that had to go out and record data, even though a news article does not name the reporter in any way. In other words, we know that a journalist’s absence from a text is just a textual construct and that interviews didn’t conduct themselves. However, at the same time this practice obfuscates that an observer is never passive, as the text implies, but one has an effect on the environment – or the environment can react back. Maybe your presence makes a small difference in a press conference among 20 other journalists, but what if you go out on the street and talk to people. Let’s consider two examples: What if the reporter is a woman and is not taken seriously by her male interview partner? Or what if a journalist is out for a sensationalist headline and willingly provokes their interview partner to an outrageous statement? Observation is always an active process, and therefore, it could help in many cases to learn more about the context that produced some statements or facts.
What Is to Be Done?
I showed in many words what issues objective journalism faces, but what should we do about it? The journalist should become more self-reflective and critically think about their role in creating the news. After all, a journalist does not copy reality on a page, but they arrange and construct it in specific ways. That’s unavoidable and there’s nothing wrong with that, yet if the world is presented without any signs of mediation, as objective journalism does, it almost seems that this circumstance is not acknowledged. On the other hand, if a journalist would draw attention to how they construct and depict the world, they would make the whole process more transparent for readers and help understand why things are presented as they are – not because it’s the only true way, but because of a bunch of journalistic decisions.
In her article “On the Relevance of Standpoint Epistemology to the Practice of Journalism” (1998) Meenakshi Durham gives an overview of how feminist standpoint theory can be applied within journalism. Just like in science, most news articles are presented from the inside out – information “is collected and interpreted by people who are inside the dominant social order about those who are either inside or outside it.” To combat this, a text should therefore “not present itself as a transparent communication of reality” but “openly acknowledge the factors that went into its construction.” In short, a journalist should be more self-critical of their methods and discuss them in the text.
And just like in scientific standpoint theory, a journalist will be able to counterbalance the weight of the unrecognized socially dominant ‘insider’ position, if their reporting begins “from the perspective of those whose lives are impacted by events.” Taking their knowledge claims and perspective on reality as the starting point will throw up an alternative set of questions and establish a wider and more inclusive societal dialogue, instead of just reconfirming the existing social order. A journalist should then both examine their own social position and how it influences their view on the world, but also incorporate the perspectives of people and communities that are either completely excluded from the news discourse or merely answer the primary definer of a topic. Why not make the position of a homeless person, or a racial minority to the starting point of an issue and let them define the ground on their terms?
My Contribution
In my discussion so far, I synthesized different pieces of information, combined them like Lego blocks and turned them into a coherent argument. But here comes my somewhat more original contribution to the debate. After all, I am taking a degree in literature, and that’s why at the core of my thesis is a literary analysis of two non-fiction works that precisely achieve what I’ve been criticizing in objective journalism. In his work Riding Toward Everywhere William T. Vollmann immerses himself in ‘hobo’ culture, rides freight trains with them through the American West, and accepts the world, partially, on their terms. Afropean (2019), on the other hand, is written by the British author Johny Pitts and documents his “black working-class journey” () through several European capitals in search of the African presence. What makes his work special is not the formal experimentations as in Vollmann’s, but rather that he sees the world through his “black gaze,” and describes how the environment reacts back to his black body.
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I will call it a day for now. In my next post I will try to introduce William T. Vollmann – an author I find in equal terms fascinating and full of himself, admirable and repulsive – and talk about the journalistic potential of Riding Toward Everywhere.
Works Cited
Eason, David L. “‘New Journalism, Metaphor and Culture.’” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 15, no. 4, 1982, pp. 142–49.
Durham, Meenakshi Gigi. “On the Relevance of Standpoint Epistemology to the Practice of Journalism: The Case for ‘Strong Objectivity.’” Communication Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, 1998, pp. 117–40.
Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left. Univ. of California Press, 1980.
Hall, Stuart, editor. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Macmillan, 1978.
Harding, Sandra. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity?’” The Centennial Review, vol. 36, no. 3, 1992, pp. 437–70.