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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, ask language why, if actions speak louder than words, then how come I can’t hear semaphor when my back is turned.
Today’s show is about the term ‘objectivity’ and how it plays out in journalism. Ooh it’s a tricky one!
On with the show.
HZ: A couple of easy questions to start: 1. What is ‘objectivity’ supposed to mean? And 2. does it exist? Have your essay on my desk by Monday.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: What is objectivity supposed to mean? I think about this all the time. And I think the way that it's often used is to mean a neutral viewpoint; but it's almost more like a universal viewpoint, like an objective truth, an objective fact is something that anyone could see; everyone can see that same thing; if we all looked at it, that's what we would see. So that's objectivity, objective truth. And then there's many layers of how that's interpreted. I don't believe in objective truth. So in a sense, I really don't believe in objectivity. And when it comes up these days, it's almost like a joke. People will be like, "That person is objectively hot" or "This is objectively a bad movie" or something like that, which are obviously subjective examples. But it's almost like a joke. Once you don't believe in objectivity anymore, discussions about truth and fact are really different.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: My name is Louis Raven Wallace, and I am a journalist, writer, audiomaker based in Durham, North Carolina, and the author of a book called The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, which is also a podcast by the same name.
HZ: I was wondering whether objectivity is supposed to be like a removal from an emotional response or like dispassion. Is it the same as dispassion? Is it the same as impartiality? I simply don't know.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: I feel like in journalism it's used as this kind of umbrella term, similar to how ‘impartial’ is used, or sometimes even 'non-biased'. And the umbrella term encompasses the scientific method practice of gathering facts and information, so we ask a question and we go out and we observe and try things and test things, and that's objectivity. But then also the mythology behind that, that there's such a thing as an impartial or a non-biased question, and that you can be neutral in how you approach a question: I think that's encompassed in objectivity.
HZ: The choice of which stories a journalist is covering at all is already going to involve some partiality: even with the best intentions, no news outlet can cover everything that's happening, so what's considered newsworthy or not will necessarily involve the application of some preferences and biases.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: One of the requirements of being inside is pretending that you're not biased, which is ridiculous. And then finally - and this to me is the most toxic kind of blood in the water part of objectivity - is the piece of it that is about the performance of objectivity: we don't want to seem biased. We don't want to seem partisan. And so sometimes that cuts directly against what is true or what we actually observe happening in the world. And often the value of objectivity is expressed as exactly that: it's about perception, and not even about the practice.
HZ: The practice or principle of objectivity in journalism started to appear in the 19th century. At the start of it, papers were funded by a political party or a business, marketing their own agendas; objectivity was not expected. But in the 1830s, there was a move to produce non-partisan daily newspapers, funded by advertising.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: Before about the 1830s, 1840s - to some that might seem like forever ago, but to me that seems like not that long ago -
HZ: You look younger than 200 years old.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: I remember when the first penny papers hit the streets, and the paper boys standing at the corner, you have the image, right, of like all those papers being sold. And that was when newspaper publishers came up with this idea of, "Let's sell this product for cheap to lots of people. And the way that we'll make money is on the advertising, primarily. And on the newspaper sales." Does this sound familiar at all? Because it's now known as the dying business model of print media.
HZ: And the whole podcasting thing.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: Yeah, but back then it was this brilliant idea for how to make money. But that approach incentivized selling the paper to the most people possible and also not pissing off the advertisers. And so this initial kind of framework of, "we need to be a little bit less partisan and we need to appear as if we're not on a side," that performance of objectivity that I keep talking about: the performance was really initially given in order to sell newspapers, not because there was some kind of comprehensive understanding that this would be the best way to tell a story or to gather information. And then later, quite a bit later than the 1830s, like almost a hundred years later, people started writing ethical codes for journalists and things that overall I think are good: like an idea that journalists would have certain practices to ensure that they weren't like getting paid to say a certain thing, or lying - those kinds of things, good ethical codes. But that came quite a bit later than the initial "We need to seem less partisan than we actually are." Those sort of teachings for journalists were also based on the rise in the use of the scientific method, which again has never been quote unquote 'objective', but I think has useful aspects to it.
HZ: I was trying to figure out the difference between objectivity and neutrality, and is it that the expectation of objectivity is that it's a personal stance and the neutrality is an institutional one?
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: I don't know; that one confuses me. I think objectivity, and part of why I chose to write about and research objectivity as a concept, is that I do think it's a little more nuanced and layered, that it can be the practice, the scientific method approach to coming up with truth and facts. And it can also be the performance of impartiality. And to me, neutrality is a little bit more flat. You just stay out of it. It's more blatantly about personal political perspective. But I don't really know. I think the word 'neutrality' also has been retired for quite some time from newsroom debates; most people do not pretend that they can be neutral on things. But I hear a lot of journalists say, "We can't be neutral, but we can be objective in our approach or in our methodology."
HZ: Whose voices are not considered objective?
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: Well, of course it's a matter of perspective and it's something that shifts, but I would say: I think the primary divide that bias versus unbias has played out on is racialized. So “white people are unbiased on race. Anybody who is not white is biased.” That's the dominant perception. And that goes way back to colonization and enslavement and understandings of white people as the only actual people, and everyone else is not a person. It's a very deeply racist idea that continues in the form of this assumption about whose perspective is the most valid and real. So whiteness confers objectivity; maleness; cisgender people… But it's really just about power. It's about who is holding power in a given moment, having the power to define that and to punish and silence other people for supposedly not being objective.
HZ: When in your journalism career did the problems of objectivity become evident to you?
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: Probably like the first day. I knew coming in that I was kind of a token, in a sense, a token trans person. I came in through a diversity fellowship. It was a program to bring in people who did community work to become journalists, which was great. And there's this reality: OK, now you're in this newsroom, and so you need to set aside all of your community ties and perspectives and not say anything publicly that would make you seem biased and da da da. And that was a talk that I had in my first week in a newsroom. It was like, “You have to remove yourself visibly from your community in order to be taken seriously in this environment.”
HZ: Right. So you got the job because of your work in the community, and then they're like, “Right, that's what you got you here, now you have to completely remove yourself from it”?
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: Yeah. I went home and told my friends, my people that, and they were like, “What? That doesn't make any sense. That is so illogical.” And I was like, “I don't know, these people have an ethics code and it says objective, and so I'm just going to give it a try.” And then I did, I gave it a try. I wiped clean my public media feeds and didn't do any more public-facing activism for years, and kind of participated in this performance of activity. But the tension of that was always there, because I always knew that I was there to try to change things. I was there as an activist, almost like a mole from the trans anti-racist abolitionist community.
HZ: That sounds helpful for the people in charge, to be like, "Oh, you can't do that because of journalism."
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: Totally. Publishers and editors made it an identity thing. It was like, “It's not that you practice the methodology of objectivity; it's that you either are or are not objective and unbiased.” And so someone who is objective and unbiased was invariably a white cis man who was not in a union, wasn't a labour organizer, wasn't on the side of the workers, for example. Journalists as workers has always been a tension. It's a tension that we see still playing out today, where journalists, as a matter of professional identity, have been forced to disavow activism. But of course, union organizing is activism. Those of us who've had to do activism on behalf of ourselves because we are marginalized people connect more easily with that concept. For me as a trans person, there's no such thing as a trans journalist without first having a trans activist exist. So we need to be one in order to be the other, that's still the case for for journalists.
Regardless of whether people identify as activists or not, there's an aspect of being out as trans that is highly, highly politicized in this historical moment in the world. And so this idea of that we are not objective is really easy to deploy against trans people and is deployed against trans people all the time to silence us and make sure that we can't tell our stories. Of course, this is always tied up with racism and sexism and patriarchy and transphobia: it's those of us who are marginalized, who are considered to be sort of inherently less objective or less neutral on these issues. So journalism struggles from from that problem and framework. But I definitely have seen that it's actually kind of a pervasive cultural thing, I think, this idea that there's some some objective narrative that is the goal of study and academia and journalism, and that objective narrative is more accessible to cis white men. And, you know, those assumptions are embedded in so many parts of our culture.
I really don't believe that trans people are the only people who can write about trans issues or something like that; I don't believe in going sort of in the other direction with it; but I really do believe in this idea that we are each the experts on our own experience, that our subjective truth and reality rigorously studied and conveyed is valuable. And that this idea that an outside person looking at us is inherently more objective has always been used to minimize the perspectives of oppressed people. But it's really just about power, it's about who is holding power in a given moment, having the power to define that and to punish and silence other people for supposedly not being objective.
HZ: The failure of the concept of objectivity has been a thing for almost as long as objectivity in journalism has been a thing.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: Almost as soon as objectivity was on the books as something that journalists should do, it was used against union organizers. And it was in about about 1930, maybe 1933, that the word 'objectivity' first appeared in an ethics code like that, by that word. So I looked and looked how far back can we go and find a journalist who was fired for supposedly not being objective. And that was of the Associated Press: in 1935, someone who was organizing one of the first unions of journalists was fired essentially for being an activist. His name was Morris Watson, and he took his case actually all the way to the Supreme Court and won. But the reason that he won was because it was a violation of these brand new fabulous labour laws and protections for people doing labour organizing, so word to the wise: if you're organizing a union in your workplace, those protections may still apply to you. If you are fired for some other form of activism as a journalist, it's actually still true that that's totally legal, because the law has been interpreted to protect the First Amendment right of the publisher over the First Amendment right of the individual.
HZ: Another problem that was there very early on was objectivity somehow also being the opposite of itself. Not in the fun way that Lewis alluded to earlier; more like a brickbat.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: So that's the funny thing, is the same debate just kind of comes up around every contentious issue. In the 1960s and 1970s it was Vietnam. And what I would say the media that was kind of left leaning centre media covered the US war in Vietnam really thoroughly and intensely, and ramped up the amount of coverage that opposed power and exposed what was going on in Vietnam, and that in turn supported a rise in protests and opposition to the war. And so a lot of people in retrospect who are more to the left see that as a victory for objectivity, a lot of people on the right then and now saw that as "liberal media bias". Does that sound familiar at all? Liberal media bias?
HZ: Nothing new under the sun, is there.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: That idea of liberal media bias was debuted like 50+ years ago. It's been around. And conservative activists came up with it as a way to say, "Any narrative that we don't like, that goes against our argument, we're gonna use this bludgeon of bias and objectivity and it's not neutral, to make it seem like it's total BS." And so that was what they did back then toward journalists who were saying the atrocities that were happening in Vietnam; they did it to journalists who were covering civil rights and the Chicano movement; they did it to journalists who covered gay rights. They did it to public media so many times. The right wing would say, "This is not objective. This is left-leaning, it's liberal media bias." And they created whole organizations, watchdog organizations, and they've been hammering on that for decades. And it has worked to shift the entire frame of what's considered objective and neutral and mainstream US media. It is a conscious strategy. I read a quote from a Republican political strategist from the 1990s who literally said, "We can have our cake and eat it too." And he was referring to this dynamic of, "We can accuse other people of media bias and we can say whatever we want and we'll make them look bad and raise our own popularity and even raise our own profile of reliability simply by saying over and over again that we are trustworthy and reliable." It's a political strategy.
HZ: The word 'bias', by the way, came from French meaning 'a slope' or 'askance'; but English got it in the mid-1500s via the game of bowls. At the time, the balls in bowls were weighted on one side so when rolled along the ground their paths would curve; the balls were biased. That notion soon became used figuratively - Shakespeare refers to it in eight of his plays - as bias makes our minds skew in a particular direction. I don't have enough experience of bowls to quite ascertain how far the metaphor can extend into the choices of news organisations; but a lot of them don't want to be accused of bias, and since they can't cater to every possible stance, they have to be biased about who they'd rather be accused of being biased by.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: Yeah, totally. They'd rather avoid that accusation from some people. White-run news organizations have been accused of being out of balance and biased against people of color and Black people for fifty years without addressing or making redress on that issue. I think that the liberal left media in the US is more afraid of being called biased on Fox News than they are of being called biased by working class people or Black and indigenous and people of color or queer and trans people.
Objectivity is one of the ideological blocks to that, it's like, "Oh, if we, as an outlet, took a pro-trans stance, it would be not objective. It would be ideological." But of course that's where it becomes very obvious that neutrality is ideological.
HZ: Taking issue with these things got Lewis fired from public media.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: I wrote a blog post. I was working for a big mainstream public media show national show covering the economy during the election of 2016 and the beginning of Donald Trump's tenure in early 2017. And I wrote a blog post that was tongue in cheek called ‘Objectivity Is Dead, And I'm Okay With It’. And what I was trying to speak to was like, hey, it's actually okay that there's a lot rancour and debate right now about truth and fact, and what's important is that those of us who want to advocate for a truthful, rigorous conversation about democracy, where we continue to pursue facts, we need to stand up to people like Donald Trump. Donald Trump benefits from white supremacy. Which I think is demonstrable truth with a lot of evidence and data points to back it up. And that was something that my employers at the time in mainstream journalism thought, "You can't write that because that's going to seem biased. It's going to seem not objective or it's gonna seem partisan." And so that sort of performance of objectivity, I think, is the place where it really, really cuts against actually journalistic integrity. We need to claim some kind of stake in this conversation, we being journalists who care about human rights and democracy and stuff. So that was the point of my blog posts. ‘Objectivity is dead and I'm okay with it.’
And I was fired for refusing to take that post down because my employers said that make it appear as if I was biased and partisan to potential audience members. The funny thing was I had not had any audience complaints about my blog post or about my stories or about bias or about my identity, any of that. But my employers felt that it was not okay to talk in that way on a public platform. And I considered just removing the blog post and negotiating. And then it was the first week that Trump was president and I had read a bunch of articles about fascism and authoritarian regimes and stuff, and how one of the first things that happens is that you start making compromises you never thought you would make before. And I just thought, " Not today. I'm not going to be, I'm not going to be bullied on. I'm not going be saying some really basic things about how Donald Trump benefits from white supremacy and transphobia, and we, as journalists should stand up to it." I stand by those words. But when I refused to take them down, I got fired.
HZ: 'Balance' is another term I hear a lot of around journalism, where instead of objectivity, it's placing subjective opinions on either side of a seesaw and hoping that equilibrium will be achieved.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: It's such an interesting concept the way that it's practiced in journalism as like this side, that side, equal amount of time for voices from the right and left, that kind of stuff is I think quite counterproductive; like if a trans person talks there'll be balanced out with someone who's anti-trans. So there's this weird equivalence between marginalized people and the random the random, like radical minority of people who really extra don't like us and our human rights that are, quote unquote, “balanced out” in stories. That sort of highly polarized debate is a wrestling match or is a boxing match kind of framework really, really benefits the people making a profit off of truth and fact in storytelling and does not - I don't think - doesn't benefit at all the quality of public debate or discussion, or the quality of information that people have access to in order to participate in that debate or discussion.
But I've been thinking a lot over the last few years about the idea of balance in the process of journalism and the process of storytelling. So less like "We're going to make a story that has equal weight on this side versus that side" and more so like: what if we applied the idea of balance in the sense of being thoughtful and egalitarian and trying to balance out power dynamics to the process of reporting stories? There's a power imbalance every time that I interview someone where I'm holding the mic and I'm deciding what goes in the story and what doesn't. And to me, balance could be something interesting that's about actually figuring out better ways to empower and give platform and give space to people whose voices have been marginalized and pushed to the side. And so I think that maybe there could be a goal for journalists and storytellers around balance that's actually about how we approach the story, that we're trying to bring more balance to the power dynamics that go into making stories. And we would be accused of being biased for approaching it that way. And, you know, who cares?
And I think without objectivity, the job is almost harder. It's almost a bigger job: we need to gather more data points, and have more to show of what we saw, in order for people to trust us. But that's sort of the point. That's what good journalism is, gathering a lot of perspectives and ways of looking at things. Not because it gathers together an objective reality for everybody, but because it conveys some sense of something that is true from some people's perspective, and the more different people and points of view that you can hear from, a lot of times I think the more reliable that information becomes - or just the more interesting.
HZ: Lewis Raven Wallace is a journalist, audiomaker, and the author of the book The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, an extremely interesting study of the history and practice of journalistic objectivity. Find his work at lewispants.com.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
nuncupative, adjective, law (of a will or testament): declared orally, especially by a mortally wounded soldier or sailer.
Try using ‘nuncupative’ in an email today. I wonder whether it covers emails these days?
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