How Objectivity in Journalism Became a Matter of Opinion
16th July 2020
But at the heart of many of these arguments is another disagreement, about the nature and purpose of journalism. As a Bloomberg employee is said to have remarked at a recent meeting, reporters are meant to be objective, but to many the distinction between right and wrong now seems obvious. A new generation of journalists is questioning whether, in a hyper-partisan, digital world, objectivity is even desirable. “American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment,” tweeted Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer-winning 30-year-old now at CBS News. The dean of Columbia Journalism School described objectivity as an “inherited shibboleth” in a message to students. The Columbia Journalism Review pondered: “What comes after we get rid of objectivity in journalism?”
The problem arose with so-called journalism schools, which attracted a couple generations of people who went into ‘journalism’ to ‘make a difference’ — the way you ‘make a difference’ is by pushing an agenda, and that agenda was invariably progressive.