Abstract
Craft’s polemic poses tough questions about the utility of professional ethics, but an even tougher question when she asks, “So, what to do?” As she tersely observes, “Dislodging core norms of journalism is exceedingly difficult.” If Craft is right that objectivity is the source of many of journalism’s problems—and I think she is right—then something indeed needs to be done.
So, what can be done and who can do it?
Change is often slow. In Michael Schudson’s story of objectivity, told in the 1978 Discovering the News, objectivity emerged as an explicit norm through a century-long process. Tellingly, the path to objectivity was fairly clear—there was limited direct ideational opposition and the public was largely on board. And it still took a hundred years. Craft’s impatience with the lack of change in the last couple of decades, while understandable, might be driven by unrealistic expectations. Objectivity was probably a special case, however. Schudson’s story is about the emergence of journalism as a distinct institution, with objectivity as the norm at the center of that institution. For nearly a century since, journalism’s institutional identity has been tied up with objectivity.
By their nature, institutions maintain a high degree of constancy. Institutions, by Craig Parson’s definition in his 2007 book How to Map Arguments in Political Science, are “formal or informal rules, conventions or practices, together with the organizational manifestations these patterns of group behavior sometimes take on.” Again, it is not hard to see from this definition that objectivity might very well be constitutive of what journalism has meant as an institution. Individuals and organizations derive their legitimacy from their institutional identity and then use the power that flows from this legitimacy to maintain their standing. Institutional arrangements, then, become a force of inertia. What’s more, because institutions are socially constructed, other social institutions have a hand in maintaining journalistic capital. When citizens and politicians expect or demand objectivity, the universe of institutional players also becomes a force of inertia. Even before we tackle the matter of what can be done, the “who can do it” question becomes daunting—the answer might be “everyone.” By that I do not mean “anyone.” I mean everyone together coordinating collective efforts. Any powerful actor whose interest is tied to the status quo could seemingly thwart change.
That being said, Vivien Schmidt’s work in political science and international relations points to sources of institutional adaptation and change. Because institutions are social, Schmidt argues, they become discursive communities where institutional actors’ ideas can make a difference. Institutional actors can have their self-interests, but others—even those with limited power—have access to discursive resources. Their ideas can tap into a toolkit of cultural ideas that become the basis for change. Debate can make a difference. Granted, as Craft points out, the reckoning every 4 years shows that debate in journalism has been a weak antidote to institutional self-interest.
One avenue for change involves ideational evolution: Norms and practices evolve to take on new meanings. In our impatience for change to come, we may ignore how it’s been creeping along the whole time. As I have documented in a 2011 article in Journalism Studies, journalists long ago described the newspaper as a mirror for society. This meant something far different than using the newspaper as a metaphor for objectivity. In the past, the mirror metaphor meant that the news of the day was the occasion for reflection, self-awareness, and insight. Yet, the norm substantially shifted as broader cultural ideas about the nature of mirrors changed.
But, norms such as objectivity might not evolve easily. On one hand, objectivity might have derived its meaning from a now departed era of high modernism, but objectivity seems to offer limited semantic room for significant evolution. It seems clear that the meaning of objectivity has shifted—such that balance may no longer be a part of its definition. Nonetheless, I believe, objectivity will prove a poor vessel for any substantially new meaning. Objectivity is a mega concept, with so many component parts that each one of those parts would need to evolve in unison. The odds on that level of alignment seem slim.
While I think objectivity’s meaning has evolved, it clearly has not evolved in such a way as to address the kinds of problems Craft and others have documented. So, what can be done?
Craft engages a significant body of scholarship dealing with paradigm repair, and this literature provides a suitable alternative entry point to address the question of what to do. While the paradigm repair literature has broadened in recent years, it has nevertheless traditionally focused on the paradigm of objectivity. As Matthew Cecil put it in a 2002 piece, objectivity has been “the cornerstone of the news paradigm.” A decade later, Mark Coddington called objectivity a primary feature of the “professional journalistic paradigm.” Cornerstones, of course, are not easily moved.
This points to an even broader question: How does any paradigm ever change? That, of course, is precisely the topic of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the source of the “paradigm” concept in the paradigm repair literature. Paradigm repair, in Kuhn’s conceptualization, can have a limited life span. Paradigms can reach a breaking point when repairs can no longer fix inherent problems. The solution is not evolution, but revolution.
Kuhn’s approach, unfortunately, does not provide a clear game plan for paradigm change. It does provide, however, a fruitful place to start. Kuhn defined a paradigm as “the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques . . . shared by the members of a given community.” This indeed sounds like an apt description of objectivity’s function in the field of journalism. It is not only, as Craft acknowledges, a set of values and beliefs but also a set of techniques and practices. Techniques are the operationalized version of values and beliefs. Both the values and the techniques have been implicated in objectivity’s failures. So, why then does the objectivity zombie persist?
Kuhn argues that revolutions come with at least two conditions. One is a crisis, a loss of faith in the viability of a paradigm. The received paradigm is no longer seen as the answer to existential threats. As John Nerone has pointed out in a 2013 article in American Journalism, journalism has already failed multiple capacity tests in the 21st century, including the Iraq War and the financial collapse and crisis. A ritualized reckoning followed each journalistic failure. While a crisis of this magnitude is probably only recognizable in hindsight, it is certainly possible that the Trump candidacy and presidency presents just such a crisis for objectivity. I refer you back to Craft’s discussion. (One possible outcome of the Trump crisis is a doubling down on objectivity, however, whereby factual journalism is held out as the solution to the problem. While facts are obviously important, this could become the occasion to hold on to objectivity as a norm, particularly as President Trump actively portrays the news media as partisan combatants.) A second condition for revolution is a viable alternative. As Kuhn puts it, a paradigm “is declared invalid only if an alternative candidate is available to take its place.” The reckoning has come to naught, I would argue, because there’s been no convincing alternative.
Craft suggests—and she is not alone is this—that transparency has been offered as an alternative to objectivity as a central journalistic norm. While she is of course correct that transparency has been called the new objectivity, I’m not convinced transparency is up to the challenge to be the alternative candidate, the basis of a new paradigm. Transparency is about norms of openness and accountability. As Michael Karlsson has argued in a 2010 article in Journalism Studies, these norms suggest two kinds of transparency: Disclosure transparency and participatory transparency. I maintain, however, that disclosure transparency has easily and already been folded into notions of objectivity. Journalists have long seen objectivity as a requirement to provide attribution from sources and have appropriated disclosure transparency without substantial resistance or reform. Participatory transparency has been the sticking point—it remains an uneasy fit with objectivity and hence functions as a challenge to the objectivity paradigm.
While transparency offers some moral direction—such was the case in the publication of the Trump dossier—it is not replete with techniques to guide daily journalism. In Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel showed a number of implications of transparency for journalistic practice. But, on the level of practice, transparency is not particularly specific. Advocates of transparency promote it as an alternative truth-telling strategy to objectivity. But this has remained vague. How would transparency have manifested in better journalism during the 2016—or earlier—elections? To be clear, I’m not saying that transparency-style journalism would not have solved some of the problems in past election coverage. I’m saying that we do not yet really have something that could be called transparency journalism. We do not have something that is an “entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques.”
This is, of course, not to say that the paradigm revolution—wherein transparency trumps objectivity—will never come. For it to come, however, we would need to do a more elaborate job of articulating transparency—or something else—as a paradigm capable of solving an existential crisis that objectivity can’t solve. As a starting point, we might begin by examining the journalism that got it right in 2016. What did David Farenthold do that was so different from those who repeated the same old mistakes? Was it any more transparent? Was it something else? This is a starting point because the point of the exercise would be to explore how this work can translate into an institutional practice and to cast this in normative terms. We would need to discursively articulate an explicitly superior paradigm.
When I say “we” must do more, who is this “we” that I speak of? In Kuhn’s telling of scientific revolutions, it’s the scientific community. This answer suggests why Kuhn’s argument might not neatly apply to journalism. First, Kuhn’s version of community seems to be suspiciously bereft of institutions and power. This is an ideal form of community, in other words, one that has no clear corollary in contemporary journalism. And second, Kuhn’s scientific community acts in relative isolation. Journalism, on the other hand, is a social institution that must negotiate its norms and techniques in dialogue with other institutions.
Provided these are not insurmountable barriers, discourse is the way forward. A paradigm’s substance is ultimately ideational; hence, it will take a discursive revolution—a new way of talking about journalism—to produce true change. Certainly, the journalistic “community” has recently attempted to renegotiate some norms. In my work with colleagues (see an article with Craft in Journalism Studies, with Jane Singer in Journalism Practice, and with Katie Artemas and Margaret Duffy in Journalism Studies, all three published in 2016), discourse is indeed the site where change can be negotiated. One discursive technique that proponents of change have used is to shift the discussion away from normative terms. Discourse about entrepreneurial journalism, a wall of separation between news and business functions of the press, and transparency all involve at least some effort to claim a change is needed based on some new reality. There may, or may not, be moral reasons to resist change, but we are told journalists must surrender to reality. This, however, is a losing proposition. It does not result in putting forward a new normative framework. But that is precisely the task journalism faces in dealing with the flaws of objectivity.
In Kuhn’s telling, adherents to the old paradigm don’t simply surrender to the superiority of the new paradigm. They take their commitments to the old paradigm with them until they exit the institutional stage. Those who embrace the new paradigm eventually take over as they gain seniority and usher in the new paradigm.
And perhaps this means change is coming soon. On average, journalists are old, so the next big wave of retirements—and forced retirements—is nearly upon us. A new generation of journalists stands ready to escort in a new kind of journalism. However, I’m not convinced the new generation has a new normative paradigm to champion. Young journalists have certainly embraced new ways of doing journalism, but it’s unclear if this is anything more than a readiness to use new tools in the service of an old journalism. New tools can be used to do the same old tasks.
For the objectivity paradigm to be replaced may require the proverbial perfect storm. But, at the very least, a replacement must be available for when the storm strikes. Back to the question of who can do this: I think we will need an expansive kind of community to craft this replacement. Journalists’ panels and trade publication debates will need to be expanded. Allowing scholars to be more active participants in this debate would be another step. Scholars already have become willing participants in the discourse. Some of the recent paradigm repair scholarship is beginning to turn up a new kind of paradigm work. There’s evidence that something different from paradigm repair is going on—something that looks more like paradigm reexamination. Scholars—particularly critics of objectivity—should become more active participants in this reexamination.
In fact, journalists seem willing, of late, to hear what scholars have to say. As others have pointed out, journalists seem willing to listen to scholars during times of crisis. While many journalists simply see the crisis as economic, scholars can partner with journalists who recognize a normative paradigmatic crisis and together forge a more compelling alternative to objectivity.
That is just the beginning. Institutional actors from other social institutions will also need to be brought into the discursive renegotiation of journalism’s core values. Some of those actors will undoubtedly negotiate in poor faith, seeking to weaken journalism as a force of accountability. The path ahead is fraught and nothing guarantees that the pattern of past reckonings will not play out again. Revolutions are indeed rare. Nevertheless, a new normative paradigm begins with a wide and open debate, one that is honest about past failings and attentive to structural conditions. I’m not convinced we’ve yet had the kind of debate where all of these factors are on the table and the goal is an explicitly new and revolutionary paradigm. Objectivity will descend its throne only when we can hail a viable alternative as its replacement. The paradigm is dead; long live the paradigm.