Can Today’s News Be Objective?

With accusations of bias flying from both sides of any conflict, the question of whether or not today’s news programs are, or indeed can be, truly objective seems almost moot. Perhaps, there’s a question that might put the entire situation in a different light, namely this: Has any news report, ever, been objective? Or how about, should news be objective?

It is automatically assumed by most people that reported news is “just the facts.” Local evening news programs tell us about next week’s weather, a child who has been kidnapped, or yesterday’s parade. There isn’t much room for bias in such stories. But the bigger the issue, the more subjective the news reports are likely to be. Many people seem to be not only contented with this but also positively jubilant about it. Why else would ultra-conservative or ultra-liberal radio talk shows and television “news programs” be so popular? (Yes, I admit, I’m thinking about Fox News right now.) Is it just that humans in general like to be told what to think? Perhaps, but is there also something else at play?

I worked at a small-town newspaper for eight years, and I’ve had my share of struggles with both co-workers and readers about what constitutes a fair, objective report of a news item. I went into the field of journalism with what I thought was a pretty good idea of what people want from their news sources. I always thought objectivity in the reporting of the straight facts was the most important thing a journalist could strive for. But I soon discovered that one what one person thought of as “objective” was not necessarily the same for everyone else.

How could this be? How could objectivity be subjective like that? The answer is easy: Pure objectivity would be as simple as it sounds in a world of people with objective views, but no one in this world can have a completely objective viewpoint on anything. We bring our own bias to anything we discuss, argue over, or just think about. We can’t help it; we’re only human. Therefore, even a straight report of “just the facts” can actually be much more subjective than you might think. It’s all about the psychology of words and attitudes. Add to that the fact that there are so many things we take for granted, and it becomes nearly impossible to decipher what’s really “hard news” and what’s not.

Imagine you’re listening to your favorite news program, and you hear the following from the reporter: “President Bush visited the troops today to bring cheer to our men and women in uniform.” Sounds innocuous enough, right? But think about how that reporter knew why President Bush was visiting the troops. He was told so, either by someone from the White House or by a press release that came from the White House.

Reporters are not omniscient; they have to take a certain amount of information on faith, as well. For all they know, the President might have been conducting a secret meeting under the guise of a visit to the troops. If so, nobody lied about it; they just left out that particular detail in the report. It may be important for the President to conduct meetings in secret sometimes, but the point is clear: Things may not be as simple as they seem.

Try this one: A newspaper prints a story about the kidnapping of a local child that says, “Police are searching the area thoroughly for any clues.” Sounds promising. But once again, we’re making an assumption. We’re trusting law enforcement to be thorough. The sentence could have read, “Police are searching the area for any clues.” It would have been just as accurate and wouldn’t have made any assumptions about the skill or determination of the individual police officers involved in the search. We want to be optimistic, of course. But optimism can color objectivity as easily as pessimism.

One more: “The township clerk, responsible for the township’s money and equipment, kept the heavy equipment on his own farm. When several neighbors attempted to view the equipment, as the law says they can, they were told by the clerk that they were trespassing and had to leave immediately.” This story paints the township clerk in a rather bad light. Let’s see how it would sound if it were written somewhat differently: “Several neighbors entered the township clerk’s property, and when he observed them, he informed them that they were trespassing and asked them to leave.”

Neither version tells whether the township clerk knew of the residents’ harmless intentions or not, but the second version definitely sounds more like he was simply trying to keep trespassers off of his property. We don’t know whether he would have welcomed them had they explained themselves, and we don’t know whether they bothered trying. But one story seems to accuse the clerk of unfairness, and the other sounds more objective. Even the more objective version could be misunderstood, of course; for instance, someone sympathetic to the clerk might read it and complain to the newspaper, saying that they were trying to implicate him in some sort of cover-up. And that is where the reader’s bias comes into play.

It’s bad enough that the reporter can write something with an unintentional bias to it. Even if they have carefully crafted their words to weed out any potential personal opinions, a reader or viewer may still make assumptions of their own, or they may feel so strongly about a particular issue that they hear bias where there is none. Human beings are virtually incapable of writing, reading, or hearing anything without putting a personal spin on it.

So what’s the point of trying? Should we give up and let personal opinions become the new “news?” One of my former co-workers expressed a view very much like that once. She felt that individual newspapers should have their own viewpoint, as directed by the editor or influenced by the individual writers, and that pure objectivity was a goal so unattainable as to be undesirable. This opinion of hers might have had something to do with the fact that she was editor at the time, but I still wonder how many newspeople out there feel the same way. And I still disagree.

I maintain that just because something is difficult, or even nearly impossible, doesn’t mean that it should be abandoned altogether. I don’t consider the extremist talk shows or opinionated television news programs to be real news. Certainly, you can glean some facts from them, but in some cases, doing this can be harder than getting the facts from a comedy news program like that one with comedian Jon Stewart. And a lot of major news sources today are hardly much better. I doubt that objective news reporting has ever been easy; I’m sure there were people arguing about objectivity when they were signing the Declaration of Independence. As long as people have had opinions and differing viewpoints, they have looked for ways to express them. Remember, reporters are human, too.

A reporter’s job is to inform people. With any luck, and a little hard work, we should be able to inform people of just the facts. It may be the hardest part of the whole job, just to write or speak these facts without bias creeping into the words. Anything worth doing is generally hard to do. But anything worth doing is worth doing well. We may be hard pressed to find a fairly objective report of the news to inform us about the state of our world, but we should still keep trying to find it, or to create it. Even if we only come close, it means we nearly made it, and we may do better tomorrow.