Media Outlets are Obsessed With Proclaiming Their Objectivity. That's the Wrong Goal
By stacy lee kong
Image: Shutterstock
As always, a note on language: As I have explained in previous newsletters, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to cast critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic; it’s dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers recently argued. That’s why it’s not antisemitic to call for a permanent ceasefire—as António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, the United Nations General Assembly, 630 NGOs around the world (including Amnesty International, the Malala Fund, Medecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Plan International, Save the Children and War Child), and the Pope are all doing. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as academics who study genocide.
On Friday, CBC News sent an email to its staff reminding them of the company’s social media policy: “in its simplest form,” the email read, “it means that on matters of public interest, controversy, politics or stories we are actively covering as a news organization, we do not post or share to ANY social media platform information that CBC has not—or would not—put on air or online. That includes information we have not verified or are not reporting ourselves as CBC News, even when it comes from external news sources.” (I did not emphasize that, btw. They bolded that on their own.) It went on to say that the company has “had to speak to speak to a few people recently about their social media posts (including RTs, reposts and likes) on the Israel-Hamas war. We may have to tighten our policies if they’re not followed. We need to protect the public’s trust in our work and our journalistic standards and practices.”
I have so many thoughts about this, starting with an extremely loud yikes over the idea of a manager perusing an employee’s likes on X/Twitter. (On a very superficial level, that is only going to lead to hurt feelings. I mean… the number of tweets I like about not wanting to go to work? And I’m my own boss!) But also: Should the gaps in a media outlet’s coverage determine what their employees engage with online? Should an employer ever get to tell an employee what they can engage with online? And does CBC really have the budget to pay someone to track what its employees are liking on social media?
More importantly, though, as journalist (and my friend) Pacinthe Mattar noted on X/Twitter this week, this reminder is “significant given the outsize role that Gaza-based social media reporting has played in showing what rarely makes it in legacy media.” It’s true—independent journalists like Bisan Owda, Plestia Alaqad and Motaz Azaiza have been instrumental in showing the world the scale of destruction, death and horror unfolding in Gaza right now. Foreign journalists are largely barred from the territory, though some Al Jazeera and Reuters correspondents are still reporting from within Gaza. There are also a few journalists from CNN, ABC and NBC embedded with the Israeli military, but since they’ve all agreed to submit their stories to the IDF for approval prior to publication, there are legitimate questions about whether their reporting can ever be fair to Palestinians—and frankly, this is a question we should be asking of legacy media in general. These outlets have been decidedly biased during this most recent escalation in tensions between Israel and Palestine, and in much of their past coverage. They censor, mistranslate, condescend to, and dehumanize Palestinians and anyone who believes they should be free, which helps manufacture consent for genocide. (The temporary ceasefire is now over and Israel has resumed bombing Gaza, where a reported 15,000 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7.) So, acting like they are neutral and everyone else is ‘being extreme’ is infuriating.
But if we’re being very honest, the first thing I thought of when I saw the screengrabs of the CBC email was, SIGH. ‘Objectivity’ strikes again. Journalists have been debating the utility of objectivity forever, or at least since the ‘60s, but here’s the point that never seems to stick: it doesn’t actually exist.
I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this, but no journalist has ever been objective
Let’s pause here for a quick definition: According to David T.Z. Mindich, who tracked the history of journalistic objectivity in his 1999 book, Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism, there are five elements of objectivity: detachment, non-partisanship, the inverted-pyramid style, ‘facticity’ (which academics Helen Caple and Monika Bednarek define as “the degree to which a story contains the kinds of facts and figures on which hard news thrives: locations, names, sums of money, numbers of all kinds”) and balance. So, ‘objective’ journalists maintain political and personal distance from their subjects, do not publicize a preference for one political party over another (and in fact, in some cases refrain from voting at all), frame their stories around facts and aren’t weighed toward one ‘side’ over another.
This sounds fine in theory. The problem is, it doesn’t hold up in practice. First, journalists often do not actually behave in this way. Second, when they do, it doesn’t lead to more trustworthy, fair or accurate coverage—it leads to bias.
To my first point: In July 2020, in the midst of the so-called racial reckoning sparked by George Floyd’s murder, CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition interviewed Candis Callison, a journalism professor at the University of British Columbia and co-author of the book Reckoning: Journalism's Limits and Possibilities, about objectivity, which she explained most newsrooms interpreted as “a view from nowhere, as a way of not acknowledging your social location as a journalist. Recognizing that the individual journalist has a view from somewhere, and that journalism has been doing all kinds of work in the past, allows you to have clarity about what you're contributing as a journalist, about whose social order you're maintaining” (emphasis mine).
Callison’s argument (which I’ve referenced before) was that ‘objectivity’ as Western journalists understand it isn’t actually possible, because we all belong to various groups, and that belonging impacts our understanding of the people and places we cover, not to mention what we consider newsworthy, the resources we’ll devote to telling those stories and how we’ll portray the people most affected. Now, don’t get me wrong. Newsroom decision-makers understand that a journalist’s identity can impact how they cover a story when it comes to those of us who belong to marginalized groups, whether that’s race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, etc. This is never considered a benefit, of course. In fact, we’re often told that we’re too biased to report on our own communities and that our lived experiences disqualify us from covering important issues. But not all journalists get the same critique. Instead, newsroom decision-makers tend to position their own perspectives, and the perspectives of people who are like them, as unbiased, objective and ideologically neutral. In truth, though, we’re talking about a group that has historically been (and, let’s be honest, remains) overwhelmingly white, male, cishet, able-bodied and at least comfortably middle class. And to my second point, their perspectives reflect these biases—not to mention uphold the patriarchal, white supremacist social order that benefits them the most.
And no outlet has, either
CBC is not the only outlet with a social media policy like this, of course. They’re not very common in lifestyle media, but totally normal at hard news organizations. In fact, two queer journalists—Jazmine Hughes and Jamie Lauren Keiles—recently resigned from the New York Times after being told signing an open letter that condemned Israel’s siege on Gaza violated the paper’s policy on public protest. (Even though neither worked in the hard news division of the paper.)
Ironically, Columbia Journalism Review just published an op-ed by researchers David M. Rothschild, Elliot Pickens, Gideon Heltzer, Jenny Wang and Duncan J. Watts that analyzed the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post for roughly two months in the lead-up to the 2022 U.S. midterm election, and found both papers’ claims of providing objective political news a “convenient fiction.”
“Regardless of what journalists and owners of major papers proclaim, however, news judgments are inherently subjective,” they wrote. “Any claims to objectivity are a convenient fiction. On any given day there are many accurate and arguably newsworthy stories that could appear on a front page… Which topics editors choose to emphasize is neither accurate nor inaccurate; they simply reflect subjective opinions. Likewise, the way an article is written also involves a series of choices—which facts are highlighted, whose voices are included, which perspectives are given weight. Words such as ‘objectivity’ and ‘independence’—even ‘truth’—make for nice rhetoric but are so easily twisted to suit one’s agenda as to be meaningless. After all, Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson—who, unlike the Times and the Post, don’t operate within the realm of reality—also stake claims to veracity and independence.” (Ouch.)
This contradiction—the NYT positioning itself as an arbiter of objectivity, but also lacking objectivity itself—illustrates what I find so frustrating about this type of restrictive policy: it presupposes that the outlet is already objective, and journalists who express opinions are undermining that impartiality. But in reality, journalism has always been subjective, because it is the product of a series of editorial choices made by human beings. I mean, Hughes and Keiles were seemingly pushed out of the New York Times for ‘supporting’ Palestinians. But, both writers told Democracy Now! that the Times’ “scrutiny of pro-Palestinian activism is a double standard that indicates tacit support for Israel.” I’d argue that many of the Times’ other decisions over the decades, including how it frames stories, its use of passive language and the people it chooses to humanize, also indicates tacit support for Israel. So: it’s worth asking why one type of support makes someone unemployable, while another is positioned not just as acceptable, but politically neutral.
Who actually benefits from calls for an ‘unbiased’ media?
I also think it’s worth questioning what, exactly, counts as ‘support.’ The open letter Hughes and Keiles signed said its signatories “stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. We stand firmly by Gaza’s people, victims of a genocidal war the United States government continues to fund and arm with military aid—a crisis compounded by the illegal settlement and dispossession of the West Bank and the subjugation of Palestinians within the state of Israel,” and sure, the language of “standing with” a group of people is explicitly about solidarity. But is it very different from how people, and specifically journalists, spoke about Ukraine at the beginning of its war with Russia? I don’t think so, tbh.
It’s also important to note that social media policies like CBC’s, or the one at Global that the company used to justify its decision to fire its only Palestinian journalist, Zahra Al-Akhrass, don’t even require support. They are seemingly designed to punish anyone with a perspective, but are applied unevenly, which only exacerbates existing inequality in the newsroom.
Because this has happened before! In 2021, more than 2,000 people, some of them CBC employees, signed an open letter calling on Canadian news outlets to apply “all the tenets of journalism… to Canadian coverage of Occupied Palestinian Territories moving forward. Fair and balanced coverage should include historical and social context, reporters with knowledge of the region and, crucially, Palestinian voices.” As this letter noted, Canadian newsrooms tend to forbid the use of the word Palestine, are skittish about using words like genocide, apartheid or occupation to describe Israel’s actions in the Gaza and the West Bank (though international human rights organizations, legal scholars, genocide scholars and other experts use those words) and rarely centre Palestinian voices. CBC’s response was to tell two CBC staffers who signed the letter that they would not be allowed to cover the conflict because their actions constituted a conflict of interest. But was that letter about support for Palestinians, really? Or was it a call for more evenly applied standards at this country’s national broadcaster? (As Mattar pointed out in another tweet, it’s interesting that CBC bans the use of the word Palestine to refer to Gaza and the West Bank, but doesn’t have any qualms about saying Taiwan, which is also a contested territory.)
To be fair, I can see the argument for not sharing your opinion online if you work in hard news, even if I’m not sure I always agree. Earlier this year, former Washington Post executive editor and current journalism professor Leonard Downie Jr. said, “I continue to believe that allowing journalists to express opinions on controversial social and political issues erodes the perception of their news organizations’ fairness and open-mindedness. As representatives of news outlets, they give up some personal rights to free expression.” Sometimes I think journalism’s reliance on objectivity is less about the act of reporting and more about protecting the brand. Because it’s not that having a perspective compromises reporters’ ability to do their jobs well; it’s that audiences may not trust journalists who disagree with them, so it’s more efficient to pretend there is no disagreement than to demonstrate trustworthiness through consistently good work. (Not to mention the real challenge of bad-faith criticism from powerful lobby groups, politicians, celebrities, etc.)
But I’m concerned about a media landscape where newsroom decision-makers classify using accurate language, acknowledging unfair treatment and pushing back against decades of entrenched bias as punishable offences and not evidence of journalists doing what they’re supposed to do: tell the truth.
And Did You Hear About…
Hypothetical Baby, an autobiographical play by Rachel Cairns, the creator of the award-winning Aborsh podcast. It’s about having an abortion on Christmas Eve, and by extension, the “personal and societal factors that shape our reproductive lives.” (Also: Friday Things readers can score $25 tickets with the promo code HYPEBAE!)
The New York Times Style Magazine’s round-up of predictions for the aesthetic, cultural, colour and food trends we’ll supposedly be obsessing over in 2024.
All the random celebrity couples that we forgot dated.
Tanya Talaga’s moving op-ed about Elaina Cecilia Nancy Beardy, an 11-year-old girl from Kingfisher Lake First Nation and Sachigo Lake First Nation who died by suicide in October.
This smart essay on the ‘campus novel’ and whether fiction actually reflects most people’s experience of post-secondary education.
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