Week 6

Truth and Objectivity

Chapters 6 and 7:

There is no way that a journalist can be objective. A person’s world view is shaped by social groups, family, political groups, events in their lives, the country in which they live, the entire context of a person’s up-bringing and current life. Some of the biases that are articulated in journalistic publications can be both/either consciously or unconsciously put there.

Objectivity is an ideology to strive for.

Truth is subjective. Truth is different for every person because their perspective is subjectively shaped.

Language shapes our description of the truth – it is not an exact communication of our perceptions, “Language is an imprecise communication tool,” (Tickle, 2001, p. 89) and “language does not describe reality, it actually constructs it.” (Turner, 1993, cited in Tickle, 2001, p.90).

There are some obvious pressures that affect journalists in the level of objectivity of their work
- Pressures from their employer (consciously or unconsciously considered) to take an angle on a story or to only write certain stories depending on media partners, advertisers, sponsors, corporate links etc.
- Pressures from the commercial structure of journalism to create appealing stories for higher audience numbers or readers – infotainment, sensationalism, short stories, soft news etc.
- Pressures from their industry alliance or association to abide by their code of conduct or ethics (AJA, MEAA etc).
- Pressures from their own conscience to express a personal bias.
- Pressures from social, cultural, religious or political networks or associations to express a certain perspective on issues.

Due to these obvious and underlying pressures that affect one’s perception of the truth, different journalists can report quite different accounts of an event or issue. The images, the content and the framing of a story (through words and focus and layout) produce the audience’s understanding of the issue or event being reported.

The impossibility of objectivity in journalism leaves it to the audiences of journalistic productions to discern the truth from what they read, hear or see.

“Gaye Tuchman argues that all news events are inherently stories and should be treated as such” (Tuchman 1978, cited in O’Sullivan, 2004). – This perspective completely disregards the ideal of objectivity as a goal to strive for. Objectivity is impossible and why pretend that it is something worth trying for?

The three level system of enquiry:
- reactive reporting – information obtained from authoritative people and documents. Reactive reporting does not account for the whole story, but the immediate event and the information obtained within time constraints.
- analytic reporting – more than a superficial report. “Journalists are looking for the answers to how and why.” (Bowman and McIlwaine, 2001, p.105).
- reflective reporting – considers broad patterns and trends – social, political issues.
Bowman and McIlwaine state that a journalist should go through each of these levels in their news gathering process.

If such a pattern of news reporting is achieved, journalists will become more accountable for the events and issues they have covered. There will be a complete coverage of the detail of an occurrence and of the wider implications it has for a society.

This kind of reporting is an ideal for journalists to strive for. It is a good theoretical process to follow. However in reality, journalists would only go through such a process for the biggest and best stories – the stories where there is a lot of public interest, or the issue should be covered as such for the public’s interest to be served at its best.

The first stories that come to mind with this process occurring is the Dr Haneef case, the federal election (and all the stories within this), terrorist attacks, large stock market changes, interest rate changes, natural disasters etc.

News values would dictate whether this 3 level process of news gathering would occur for a story – is it affecting a large proximity of the population, is the impact of the event worth the coverage, is the event unusual enough to be covered, how long ago did the event happen and are the impacts still being felt? Etc.

Again – the issues covered this week serve to highlight to difference between theoretical ideals and the reality of journalistic practices. It is still important, in my opinion, to keep such ideals in mind when practicing journalism, so as not to lose sight of the reason for being a journalist or the reason for reporting the news. Reminding oneself of the theoretical reasons behind journalistic practices ensures that reality does not stray too far away from these ideals.

References:

Bowman L, McIlwaine S, 2001, ‘The importance of enquiry’, Tapsall S and Varley C, Journalism: Theory in Practice, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 102 – 112.
O’Sullivan R, 2004, ‘Exploding the objectivity myth: A case study of participatory journalism’, ejournalist.au.com, issue 04/01, 23 pages, viewed 27/8/07, http://www.ejournalism.au.com/ejournalist/osullivan.pdf

Tickle S, 2001, ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but…’, Tapsall S and Varley C, Journalism: Theory in Practice, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 89 – 101.