Objectivity in journalism doesn't exist: A case in four parts
Many new outlets are trying to will journalistic objectivity into existence and they're going to waste a lot of money doing it.
So, we’ve been talking a lot about objectivity lately. Like, a lot.
I get it. The journalism institution is withering away, and people are trying to find the answer as to why. Instead of focusing on decreasing resources and an increased reliance on conglomerates that continue to drain said resources, this straw man wants to blame media bias.
And that’s fine. Journalists just report on the facts, right? Not doing so is what’s caused the downfall of journalism over the past decade! A focus on “toxic,” negative stories and clickbait that sews discord is what’s contributed to the divide among Americans. It’s the first thing many of us learn in J-school, so why wouldn’t it be important? We should totally just stab journalism.
But objectivity has never existed here, at least not fully. A story can never be impartial to the politics and beliefs of the people involved, nor are major events almost ever detached from the people at their center. Articles almost always take one side over the other, especially when you’re talking about one person’s or group’s story and perspective. Journalists should certainly strive for objectivity, a.k.a. for the facts and for the world as it is, but it has to be just the first step.
As Wesley Lowry writes, news outlets aren’t about “objectivity” but about “the appearance and performance of supposed personal objectivity. It’s done for the purpose of “wielding the term to police personal expression—not journalistic work—in both public and private contexts.” If an outlet can point to its work and say “We’re being objective” then that’s all it needs, even at the expense of writers who are impacted by stories themselves.
Since we know that it’s impossible to be unbiased, it rings particularly dishonest to have publications claim to have found the secret to success. The New York Times will probably tell you that it’s this that has allowed it to function for so long as the paper of record. Former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron described it as being “fair, honest, honorable, accurate, rigorous, impartial, open-minded” in contrast to critics of the idea (of which he names none). But now publications are hiding behind a veneer of objectivity to dismiss any criticism. Lowry wrote that objectivity is a tool for “exclusion,” not only to other journalists who don’t meet certain arbitrary standards but to underrepresented groups who will subsequently be harmed by one-sided reporting.
And yet, so many outlets are popping up that claim objectivity as part of their mission statement — sometimes in the first couple sentences. Some don’t even have a way to define it, so maybe they’re letting the work speak for itself. It’s tough not to look at all of them — from Semafor, to the Free Press, to the Messenger — and wonder what could be driving this laser focus on objectivity in the press. Or even what it actually means.
So let’s take a look.
Semafor: Competing perspectives
Semafor is a media liberal’s dream. It launched in 2022 from co-founders Ben Smith (former founding EIC of Buzzfeed News) and Justin Smith (former CEO of Bloomberg), and promised quite a few things. It wanted to build an international newsroom, with writers covering the U.S., Europe, and even sub-Saharan Africa, funded primarily by advertising dollars. It’s also funded by many prominent investors, including Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information, former The Atlantic owner David Bradley, and more controversially, indicted and alleged crypto con artist Sam Bankman-Fried (Semafor has been working to repurchase his $10 million investment).
(Side note, it’s extremely funny that two white guys with the last name Smith founded Semafor).
But most importantly, Semafor wants to combat distrust in the media. The publication doesn't explicitly talk about “objectivity” but it alludes to the problem of polarization in news and in society, the lack of trust for the press, and how it’ll seek to rectify that.
It writes on its About page:
Enter Semafor. The world’s first news platform designed to meet the moment we are in. Providing audiences with an unparalleled level of journalistic transparency through innovative new forms, cutting through the noise of the news cycle with smart, distilled views and exploring competing perspectives across borders for a curious, new global audience.
So it’ll cut through the chuff and offer multiple perspectives on an issue. Easy enough. It does this with the “Semaform,” an article structure that starts with the story itself, goes into background information, then offers the writer’s analysis, and ends with the opposing view. It’s just a more formal way of combining news and editorial, but it works, and frankly, it’s stuck around longer than a lot of other attempts by other organizations for something similar. It’s a bit innately condescending, seeming to claim that in order to counter polarization, it needs to be extra clear what is news and what is opinion. Granted, I’ve encountered many readers who don’t seem to understand the difference, so maybe this directness is warranted.
For Semafor’s audience — college-educated liberals who want a quick way to digest world news events and politics — this concept is fine. It’s inflexible and, frankly, arbitrary, but I’m not in that audience. It doesn’t have to impress me. But it’s this template where the problem lies. How can you differentiate between news and opinion? Many Semafor articles can’t seem to do it. I clicked through a few, and they’re all well written and well reported, but its “view” sections lack an actual viewpoint or personal perspective. Rather, they feel like extensions of the news portions or just offer further analysis.
The two Smiths and their international crew want to fight polarization by focusing on honesty and transparency, which is a worthy goal that every publication should strive for, but in their rigidity, they haven’t solved much of anything.
The Messenger: Whatever “polyperspectivity” is
Last week marked the long-awaited launch of The Messenger, a new media venture by Jimmy Finkelstein, who was most recently the owner of The Hill. Since then, multiple resignations have been reported, including a top politics editor and West Coast breaking news editor Kristen Bender. The situation is so messy, that I went on a bit of a ramble below, so apologies for forcing you to learn too much about The Messenger, but it is fascinating.
The outlet promises right off the bat that it would publish “impartial and objective news.” Its short mission statement begins with a call for objective news coverage in a world where outlets “inflame the divisions in our country by slanting stories towards an audience’s bias.” It goes on to say it’ll accomplish its goal by bringing people news in a few different categories — entertainment, lifestyle, politics, the usual. There’s no evidence as to how it’s going to bring objectivity to journalism when seemingly everybody else has failed. It’s just that it’s going to do it.
Finkelstein himself has said separately that the publication would work for “polypersceptivity,” which seems to mean it’ll seek multiple perspectives to build out its case for objectivity. But in practice, if launch day is any indication, that means getting an exclusive softball interview with Donald Trump and one of the most incongruous series of stories I’ve seen on a purportedly serious website’s homepage. It covers everything from Love is Blind, to Jeffrey Epstein, to a story about a 99-year-old woman throwing circus knives and the 10 Tantalizing Social Media Chefs You Really Should be Following. It seems to publish a new story every few minutes, which is one way to get polypersceptivity; if you overwhelm the reader with multiple viewpoints, I suppose it’s possible to get some kind of average.
“I was told that this was going to be long-form journalism and all it was was aggregated content and clickbait, and to me, that’s not journalism,” Bender told The Daily Beast about her resignation.
But if we’re talking about multiple perspectives, we need to head to the opinion section. It’s tough to search through specific verticals on The Messenger’s site but we have a decent look at what the last two days looked like thanks in part to Nieman Lab (definitely check out its coverage on The Messenger if you haven’t already, especially the data on the new site’s most common topics) and just what I see on the homepage as of an Wednesday afternoon last week. The bylines are mostly men, minus two from women: one on recent Supreme Court scandals from a University of Virginia professor also on the publication’s board of experts (more on this later) and another on college acceptance rates from the founder of a college admissions company. Elsewhere we have a ghastly editorial on how we should adapt a state-centric political system because Trump is a fascist and Biden’s son allegedly did a corruption (gross), a milquetoast call for the courts to allow for student debt relief (meh), and another from a former FBI official about how the organization targeted Trump because of a bias built on “made-up research” (fucking yikes). If you want to publish multiple perspectives that run the gamut to create any sense of “objectivity,” then The Messenger has succeeded.
We also can’t talk about The Messenger without talking about its (turns on sarcasm voice) groundbreaking The Messenger Scale, which it describes as a “Richter Scale for earthquakes — but for news.” Basically, it's an experimental tool that assigns breaking news a score symbolizing how important it is based on a panel of 80 “experts.” Granted, this group is more diverse than its opinion section was, but it does include a guy who just writes political thrillers and Dancing with the Stars contestant Sean Spicer.
I don’t have a lot of words for this one, and I hope readers can see for themselves how nonsensical this is as a concept. Review scores are already a poor representation of somebody’s opinion since they fail to not only address subtleties but are also impossible to quantify in a universal and fair way. To assign review scores to actual important current events is baffling since people will prioritize what matters most to them. Plus, while it lists out its panel for the sake of transparency, it doesn’t explain its rubric, which is an interesting omission for a site that claims objectivity is its priority.
There’s something almost adorable about The Messenger, which is about as close to an old media investment as you can get. It’s spearheaded by veteran entrepreneurs, and it was financed with $50 million from outside investors. It seeks to bring back the golden days of 60 Minutes, which hasn’t been relevant to anybody under the age of 60 since we as a culture had to stop making fun of Andy Rooney’s tirades because he died.
All of this will supposedly lead to immense profits, with a goal to bring in $100 million in revenue next year and bring in 100 million monthly users, according to the New York Times. That’s lofty considering all the media layoffs over the past year (although granted, few of those have to do with a lack of profit), but it also implies that The Messenger would be one of the most-read publications on the internet (for reference, I worked for specialty sites that could bring in maybe 5 million monthly users).
I could go on and on here. The Messenger is one of the most baffling media startups I’ve seen in a while, and the fact there have been multiple resignations, some even before it launched, show it might have been rotten from the start. It’s a kitchen-sink approach where everything in the sink is coffee grounds and food scraps, and that’s not healthy for anybody.
Exposure Scale: 11/10
The Free Press: The world as it isn’t
I’m not going to focus too long on The Free Press. Anybody can spend five seconds on the homepage and see there’s nothing but bias as far as the eye can see. But it’s yet another publication that wants to tout its dedication to honesty in journalism, so we’re going to talk about it.
The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss, is a response to issues she saw while she was a New York Times columnist. “I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history,” she said in her resignation letter. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”
She said that The Free Press was “built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence. We publish investigative stories and provocative commentary about the world as it actually is—with the quality once expected from the legacy press, but the fearlessness of the new.”
By fearlessness, it means publishing op-eds talking about how pickeball is bad because players don’t care about hard work and merit anymore or about how high school debate teams are suffering because of political correctness. By “the world as it actually is,” it means using little critical thinking to tell the story of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” an compare the criticisms of the awful things she’s said to actual censorship.
The Free Press, most impactfully, has also been a key player in the story of Jamie Reed, a former employee of the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, who claimed in an essay on the site that the center had been engaging in “morally and medically appalling” behavior towards its patients. Reed claimed children were being rushed into using hormones and puberty blockers without proper oversight, which led to sterilization. She was “concerned” with the increase in intakes, and that the center was sending kids into gender-affirming surgeries. These are shocking allegations that were quickly contradicted by a couple dozen families who went to the center.
I’m not interested in breaking down this story right now. Other people have done it better. The Free Press wasn’t particularly interested either, deciding instead to hold up Reed on a pedestal and parade her around for their subscribers instead of following up after contrasting reports came out. If it cared about the world as it actually is, it would’ve done its due diligence to continue covering the story with both sides, but it did not.
I’ll say one thing about The Free Press. It is mostly free to read, and they’re pretty honest about their point of view. But it is not the world as it is, and it’s laughable to think it would be.
The New York Times: Against “activism”
While many new outlets are addressing objectivity, a lot of the discussion centers around legacy publications, especially The New York Times. The “paper of record” is held to a high standard because of its legacy, and it’s done a lot to earn that distinction. But as somebody close to me once said, “The New York Times produces excellent journalists but horrible writers.”
Take the paper’s opinion section, which has stepped in it multiple times over the years. It came under a lot of understandable fire in 2020 when it published an op-ed by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton called “Send in the Troops” in response to the George Floyd protests. The senator, as you might’ve guessed from that headline, called for military force against antifa “rioters.” There was a ton of backlash from within the organization, and the section eventually said the piece didn’t meet their standards (and the editorial page editor resigned), but the damage was done. It was up and wouldn’t be taken down. It wasn’t the first incendiary piece that made an underrepresented group feel afraid, and it won’t be the last.
Lately, the Times has been testing its readership with a series of reports on trans people that have taken… a certain side, to put it simply. Hundreds of staffers and many more outside the organization (including me) signed an open letter calling for the paper to look at its recent reporting on trans people and see the “editorial bias” in its coverage, pointing at its questioning of gender-affirming care, which featured very few responses from actual trans people, and its focus on “pseudoscience.” GLAAD also sent a separate but similar letter. “This is damaging to the paper’s credibility. And it is damaging to all LGBTQ people, especially our youth, who say debates about trans equality negatively impact their mental health, which is a contributing factor to the high suicide rates for LGBTQ youth.”
“The New York Times produces excellent journalists but horrible writers.”
It shouldn’t be a moral or political discussion at all when we’re talking about a very real group of people who need a certain level of care to live. Yet, the Times’ response has been less than ideal, falling behind calls for objectivity in reporting and against what it calls activism. “We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums,” a response letter said. It noted that the paper’s transgender coverage was “deeply reported” and “sensitively written” and then condemned “attacks” against those writers.
“The way that the masthead talks about activists, you would think that activists only exist on the left,” said one staffer to Vanity Fair.
But this isn’t a call for activism. It’s just for editorial standards! A lot of these articles have received harsh criticism because they lack any amount of due diligence, with extremely political stances taken by right-wing activists that belong to anti-trans groups published without that proper context!
Publisher A.G. Sulzberger penned in a gigantic CJR essay that "journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous. And I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers." But that implies issues like whether trans kids have the right to exist and get care are a political issue that needs “both sides” to weigh in. It doesn’t. It just needs to actually center trans people and their voices.
Journalists have been arguing over what objectivity means for more than a century, ever since Walter Lippmann declared journalism needed more scientific standards. And while his writing on the subject made it clear that figuring out how to report on the news is important for society to function, people are still arguing over what exactly he meant. How can so many different publications claim to head towards the same goal but take wildly different steps to get there?
One of the many, many problems journalism has today is that reporters and editors are clinging to an interpretation of objectivity that doesn’t and can’t exist and at the cost of the people they should be reporting on. At best, they’re missing the mark; at worst, they’re deceiving readers. The best we can do is to understand that “objectivity” isn’t a distancing but rather a confrontation. If we face the story, note every piece, and put it together in ways that might be messy, we can get at least a bit closer to doing the right thing. Otherwise, we get The New York Times.
Reading list
That’s enough of me. Why not read somebody else?
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