How Trump should change the way journalists understand “objectivity”; Vox, August 4, 2020

 Sean Illing, Vox; How Trump should change the way journalists understand “objectivity”

"Some of the most interesting thinking on this topic has come from Tom Rosenstiel, a media scholar and the executive director of the American Press Institute. Rosenstiel recently responded to a terrific essay by reporter Wesley Lowery, who argued that newsrooms are facing a long-overdue reckoning over the very meaning of objectivity.

Lowery’s point — and it’s a good one — is that objectivity has come to mean presenting neutral arguments to an imaginary reader who is “invariably assumed to be white.” And the problem isn’t that objectivity varies according to race, but that this assumption means “the contours of acceptable public debate have largely been determined through the white gaze.”

Rosenstiel, who has co-written a book on the ethics of journalism in the digital age, agreed with Lowery, but used his piece as an opportunity to clarify what “objectivity” has traditionally meant for journalists and how it’s “been turned on its head.” For Rosenstiel, journalistic objectivity was never intended to mean neutrality or balance; instead, it meant something like the pursuit of truth using objective methods. Because journalism is conducted by human beings and therefore can never be truly objective, their methods have to be instead. A journalist’s duty is to write “what they can prove” — and if they can prove one side is lying and the other is telling the truth, that’s what they should write.

I reached out to Rosenstiel by phone to talk about that distinction and why the prevailing misunderstanding of objectivity matters.

On one level, this is a very inside-baseball exchange on contemporary journalistic ethics. But it’s also a discussion about how to tell the truth in a media environment that rewards engagement and clicks above all else — a problem that implicates us all."