In Defense of Objectivity

I've seen too many people attack objectivity as stupid and wrong; abandoning all notions of neutrality to buttress their naked partisanship. I think this belief is not only wrong, but dangerous. 

I hate to go Reducto ad Hitlerium, but ya know who doesn't believe in journalistic objectivity? Putin. He doesn't allow journalists to report "just the facts," if those facts make him look bad.

The reason I find the absence of any pretense of objectivity to be dangerous is that it becomes a slippery slope to propaganda.

In describing what he dubbed "Social Justice U", Jonathan Haidt invoked this quote from Marx: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

The important role of journalism is to report the news and keep an informed citizenry. As soon as you abandon that mission, and adopt something like "moral clarity", you've then stepped into activism. You've changed your mission to something closer to Marx's vision of trying to change society. Then you're just a small step from propaganda. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with activism; it's just that it is decidedly not journalism. And journalism is too important to do away with.

Objective Communities

As I've quoted before, Scott Siskind states that objectivity isn't a binary, but a spectrum. But in The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch described a Karl Popper quote that I like even better.

“Truth, as Karol Popper said, is a regulative principle. Like north, it is a direction, an orientation, not a destination."

Rauch then goes on to describe how truth and objectivity are something that comes about from a community, not an individual.

"When we join the reality-based community … we resolve to conduct ourselves as if reality were out there and objectivity were possible, even while acknowledging that reality is elusive and perfect objectivity is impossible.”

For most of the 20th century, we had trust in the media because it was composed of a community that strove for objectivity. Rauch writes that when the American Society of Newspaper Editors was founded in 1922, its first order of business was to promulgate an ethics code, including things like distinguishing between news and opinion, soliciting a response from anyone whose reputation or moral character might be impugned in print. "To news professionals, correcting error should be a point of pride, a distinguishing and defining feature of the culture.”

These journalistic norms induce writers to paint a more complete, fair, and accurate picture of their reporting. Abandoning these norms because they reek of "performative neutrality" and you abandon truth.

In as much as biases exist, that makes the strongest case for viewpoint diversity. A single opinion writer might not present an objective view, but an editorial board with panoply of perspectives will do a pretty good job.

Knowledge of Self

When Rauch writes about conducting ourselves as if objectivity were possible, even while acknowledging that perfect objectivity is impossible, he's talking about something very real that I think many different groups of people can understand.

• Christians know that we are not free from sin. That knowledge doesn't lead them to rob, rape and pillage but to try seek redemption for when they do sin and strive to do better.
• White readers of Robin DiAngelo don't read White Fragility, learn about implicit biases and microagressions, and then conclude they can never not be racist so they might as well join the Klan. They try to be more mindful and look for ways to minimize harm against the black community.
• The rationalist community doesn't read about cognitive biases and conclude that people are hopelessly irrational. They develop systems and norms for overcoming biases and being less wrong.

This is even measurable. Phillip Tetlock's research into Superforcasters detailed observations about which personality traits led to people being right more than everyone else: they developed base rates to anchor beliefs and avoid recency bias, they thinked in probabilities rather than absolutes, they updated their positions as new information arrived. 

They kept a broad curiosity about the world, using multiple lenses rather than getting bogged down in one. They were more objective and this led to them being more right and less wrong. (To circle back to Rauch's point, Tetlock also found that a superforecaster's performance improved when grouped together with other superforecasters, thus proving the point about communities' ability to point toward a more truthy reality.)

If partisans, activists, or hedgehogs had the correct world view, then they would be ones making the most accurate forecasts. 

Words Matter

A professor started a twitter thread about "performative neutrality" that started off looking like a knock on objectivity but ended up actually defending it. Better yet, it was more like "saying you are objective isn't enough, you have to do these things to be something closer to objective."

He gives a good example.

What word did you choose? That word matters! It frames how someone new to the is going to perceive and frame the conflict.

While there will be lots of answers in class Monday, I expect most will say something like:

• War
• Invasion
• Conflict

— Jeremy Littau (@JeremyLittau) February 25, 2022

He pointed out how careful one has to be in choosing words. Yes, ten different writers might choose ten different words to describe what is happening in Ukraine. But a reasonable group of editors can agree on a ranking of those words from most to least objective and choose accordingly.

This takes work, but it is far from impossible. And while I still think there is a place for activist writing, it should never replace actual objective-seeking journalism.

Evolve

Now, all of this isn't to say the what our society needs is a reversion to "the way things were." For instance, I hate fact-checking journalism. It does nothing, really. And it often suffers from a bias that journalism is supposed to solve.

But if there is a direction for journalism to evolve, I think it's closer to the work of Amanda Ripley and Solutions Journalism Network. In her groundbreaking essay, Complicating the Narratives, Ripley notes that traditional journalism no longer has the same impact. 

"most of us have simply doubled down in recent years, continuing to do more of the same kind of journalism, despite mounting evidence that we are not having the impact we once had. We continue to collect facts and capture quotes as if we are operating in a linear world. But it’s becoming clear that we cannot FOIA our way out of this problem. If we want to learn the truth, we have to find new ways to listen."

If people like Wesley Lowery want journalism to evolve to something like activism or moral guidance, Ripley thinks it should evolve to be more like conflict mediation. 

"If any of us want to understand what’s underneath someone’s political rage, we need to follow stories to these moral roots — just like mediators. “People tend to keep describing their stories in the same way,” McCulloch says. “In mediation, you try to flip that over and say, ‘How did you come to that? Why is this story important to you? How do you feel when you tell it to me?’”

In a way, this is activism as it has the potential to change society. But it's antitribalist as opposed to the bias-confirming moral clarity that increases tribalism. 

I do worry that the move from community journalism (eg New York Times) to individualistic journalism (eg Substack) will lead to more biases and less objectivity. But if there is a path for journalism to get us out of conflict and serve a great societal need, this is it.