Almost every commercial media outlet claims to be "objective." Likewise, most professional journalists would proudly swear allegiance to “objectivity.” This supposed neutrality perspective is, in fact, an Anglo-American legacy that has been widely adopted by media in other parts of the world too. It is a legacy of corporatist victory over partisan press. As in the UK, the US press, affiliated with political parties, was highly partisan until the 19th century. The US Socialist Party alone published some 325 daily, weekly, and monthly publications with two million subscribers. Its major organ, Appeal to Reason, had nearly a million subscribers.
According to Robert McChesney, a progressive US media scholar, the notion of politically neutral, non-partisan, and “objective” journalism did not exist in the US until the 20th century. The point of journalism was to persuade. When, during the 19th century, the logic of newspaper publishing changed from being political to being commercial, the corporate press increasingly began to depend on advertising as a key source of revenue. However, dependence on advertising was harshly criticised not merely by a strong working-class press, even liberals questioned the commercial logic of the press and its consequences for democracy. Criticism of the commercial press was so widespread that in the 1912 election campaign all challengers to President Howard Taft, in particular socialist candidate Eugene Debs, criticised the capitalist bias of the press.
In 1919, Upton Sinclair published his magnum opus The Brass Check. It was the first systematic critique of a capitalist press under a liberal democracy. It was in such a charged atmosphere that the notion of professional journalism came of age, according to McChesney. “Savvy publishers understood that they needed to have their journalism appear neutral and unbiased...or their business would be far less profitable.” It was also during these debate that publishers pushed for the establishment of formal “schools of journalism” to train a cadre of “professional” editors and reporters. None of these schools existed in 1900; by 1920, all major American schools such as Colombia, Northwestern, Missouri, and Indiana were churning out “professional” journalists.
McChesney says the argument went that trained journalists were granted autonomy by the owners to make the editorial decisions, and these decisions were based on their professional judgement, not the politics of the owner and the advertisers or their commercial interests to maximise profit. As trained professionals, journalists would learn to tame their own bias as well. Readers could trust what they read and not worry about who owned the newspapers. The regime of objectivity and neutrality also produced the culture of sensationalism in the form of genres like sports and crime reporting: such genres were safely neutral.
However, Oliver Boyd-Barret, a radical British media academic, thinks the development of journalistic “objectivity” in the Anglo-American context has roots in a variety of traditions, of which one is the news agency tradition of reporting, in particular of financial news reporting.
In the 1820s, financial news was a key source of income for the news agencies. Trading companies in Brussels, London, Amsterdam and Paris were their key clients. According to Boyd-Barret, “Credibility and reputation depended crucially on the willingness of the agency to disclose accurate and validated information, above all market-sensitive information, as soon as it was received, to all paying clients without exception.” There are other media scholars who have established the link between “objectivity” and its capitalist logic. Yet the news industry and, worse, the educational establishment, has continued to preach the merits of this regime of objectivity to journalism as the most desirable or valuable criterion.
As we know from the works of numerous researchers and scholars, most notably Noam Chomsky and Chris Herman’s seminal study Manufacturing Consent, objectivity is deceit. In the first place, it is a vague and an ambiguous value. Robert Hackett and Yuezhi Zhao characterise “objectivity” as an interrelated complex of ideas and practices which provide “a general model for conceiving, defining, arranging , and evaluating news texts, news practices, and news institutions”. The regime of “objectivity” comprises five dimensions: a normative ideal (factualness, detachment, accuracy, etc.); epistemology (assumptions about knowledge and reality, like the possibility of separating values from facts); a set of news gathering and presentational practices (like the use of appropriate sources); a set of institutional relations (complex, specialised news organisations staffed by professionals and enjoying autonomy from the state); and an active ingredient in public discourse, providing the language (“bias,” “fairness,” “balance”) for everyday talk about the news.
In practice, both the practice and conceptualisation of objectivity keep shifting. For example, one of the popular hallmarks of “objectivity” is to show “both sides of the picture.” However, often both “sides” belong to the same camp. The popular talk shows Pakistani audiences are subjected to every evening best delineate this practice. For instance, pitching one rightwing person against another rightwing person can hardly be characterised as objective presentation of “both” sides. Similarly, the use of “appropriate sources” to provide relevant and credible “fact,” is yet another trademark attributed to “objectivity.” However, it just so happens that the available sources are frequently representatives of powerful institutions/structures. For instance, in case of our domestic “war on terror” we are either provided the ISPR side of the story or statements by Taliban spokesmen.
In situations of crisis the notion of objectivity is simply cast aside. After 9/11 and during the Iraq War, the US media simply ignored even the basics of the “objectivity” regime. Likewise, we have seen Indian and Pakistani media squashing every notion of “objectivity” on several occasions in the last twenty years (the nuclear blasts by the two countries, Kargil, the Mumbai attack). As a matter of fact, the mask of “objectivity” on the whole legitimises established power relations. According to Hackett and Zhao, “It systematically produces partial representations of the world, skewed towards dominant institutions and values, while at the same time it disguises that ideological role from its audiences. It thereby wins consent for ‘preferred readings’...embedded in the news.”
The writer is a freelance contributor.Email: mfsulehria@hotmail.com
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