Can Journalism Be Impartial? Session 1: Can Interpretive Journalism Still Be Impartial?

Professor Jim Carey of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, moderated:

"For most of the 300 year history of journalism in North America it has been primarily an activity of polemics and ideology... Journalism was subsidized by political parties, and journalists who felt themselves to be fully respectable and responsible spoke for the interests and the outlooks and the values of such parties.

That started to change late in the 19th Century ... for a very good reason....The principal political issue of the late 19th Century was the suffrage of black Americans... Republicans needed such votes; Democrats didn't want them."

"Journalists started to break loose...to declare themselves the journalistic equivalent of independent voters... Free of partisan commitments. With outlooks and understandings that were aimed more at a common interest or a public interest.

"Things are much different today than they were in 1900...At a newspaper like The New York Times ... the events it addresses itself to are rather more complex ... than they were 100 years ago. Therefore, the amount of interpretation that's necessary to clarify these events has changed."

Bill Keller, Managing Editor of the New York Times, explained how the Times tries to deal with this balance of maintaining an honest search for telling the truth in a more interpretive style of telling the news. The line between partiality and impartiality, he suggested was the line between trying to explain events and trying to root for one side or the other, the difference between applying judgment and passing judgment. Yet he acknowledged, while not specifying too greatly, that biases and bad habits, such as intellectual laziness or a bias toward institutional sources, often get in the way.

"All journalism is in some measure interpretive, virtually by definition. [and] yes, it can be impartial to the extent that any human endeavor can be impartial, which means imperfectly and with a margin of error.

"When objective legions of AP reporters start out to contemplate their assignment each day, they've already set their foot on the slippery slope of interpretative journalism. What we do in this business is apply judgment to information -- [though] not always good judgment....The reporter, usually with some guidance from an editor, decides where to go, whom to interview, how to describe what he saw, what to put in the lead, whom to quote, what to omit. The reporter decides which expert or critic to solicit for views on what the event means and which of these views to take seriously enough to actually put in the paper. . . Every word represents a choice, and those choices affect how a story is understood by readers.

"What we tend to call interpretive journalism is just another step or two on the same slope. It may mean supplying context, pointing out that what the President said today contradicts what he said a month ago, or comparing the ethnic warfare in Burundi with the ethnic warfare next door in Rwanda. It may mean supplying analysis, suggesting that Janet Reno's decision not to establish an independent counsel helps or doesn't help Al Gore's prospects for the presidency. Looking for patterns, looking for motives, looking for influences that explain the behavior that we report on. That's interpretation.

"I think that interpretation is, if anything, more important now than it has been in the past. In an age when people have probably more access than ever before to raw information, they depend more than ever on us to help them make some sense of it. It's what they buy newspapers for, I think. It's what they turn on their television set for... What's important? Why does it matter? What does it mean? If we ignore these questions, I think we abdicate our responsibility.

"....I think there is a line between interpretation and partiality, but it's one that we often stumble towards in the fog. It's the line, you might say, between applying our judgment and passing judgment.

"We strive for coverage that aims as much as possible to present the reader with enough information to make up his or her own mind. That's our fine ideal...We strive for coverage that is not distorted by the feelings and biases of the writers and editors -- by their ideology, their politics, their religion, their tastes, their personal grudges....

"...Numerous philosophy term papers have been spent on the question of whether true objectivity is ever possible...but I don't think it's what we're here for. As a practical matter, we live with the assumption that we can come pretty close. We don't think it's unreasonable to expect jurors to render fair verdicts, or teachers to teach honest lessons, or historians to write impartial history, or scientists to perform unbiased research. Why should we set any lower goals for poor journalists?

"Good news organizations go to considerable lengths to try to enforce impartiality. I'll run through a few of the things that we do at the Times. We try to hire reporters and editors who understand and respect the notion of fairness. We subject their work to a kind of peer review called editing. We press reporters to learn and report the different sides of an issue, the different viewpoints. We push for attribution, and where information can't be attributed to somebody by name, we try to characterize the possible biases of the source. Often a fact or opinion is not sufficiently attributed to meet our standards, and we leave it out.

"We set standards to prevent conflicts of interest on the part of our staff. We restrict economic holdings and relationships. We prohibit partisan political activism. We encourage reporters and editors to listen to our critics and to take them seriously. We read our competition and compare what we've said with what they say. . . We publish corrections -- lots of corrections which probably suggests how often we fall short of our goals.

"Ultimately, I think the most important enforcement mechanism and the most important test of our credibility is the trust of our readers."

Phil O'Brien, Managing Editor of WNBC-TV in New York, said television places special pressures on impartiality, especially the unique compression of local TV. On TV even the facial expressions and inflections of the broadcaster can cross the line. And in local, where there is sometimes less training time and reflection, far too often the most basic rules of fairness--such as getting comment from the accused-- are not fulfilled.

"I am a strict constructionist in the way that I think reporters should approach a story, sources, how they gather information, how tape is shot and edited. I'm a bit of a radical when it comes to how that is presented to the public... The sound bite is the quintessential characteristic of television news. It's also the symbol of all that's wrong with television news. The nine second sound bite that's supposed to wrap up the entire world, or the President's views or the Mayor's opinion on something...

"I'm a believer in letting a sound bite run longer. People speak to a camera with their eyes, with their hands, with their gestures as well as their words, with their pauses. Too often in my end of the business it is cut short.

"We can never be completely impartial... [But] what we do at Channel 4 is follow some very strict rules. Some of them are even written down and passed on to people. Some of them come along the road like sign posts and are gathered through experience and hard knocks. . .

"For instance, we just should not air a story if both sides are not presented. It sounds simplistic, it sounds basic, but look around the dial and you will see that does not always occur.

"Last week as is typical at this time of the year, a respected consumer group published their list of the most dangerous toys... I believe that only three of some six stations bothered to call the toy manufacturers for their comment. This is basic stuff that doesn't get done, but must get done.

"Too often in television news the copy in its tone or content is not impartial...I have a strict rule against the word[s] ‘thanks to'. ‘The Boys Club in Queens was about to close, but the community got together and raised money and thanks to their effort, the club will remain open.' That is taking a side."

"Similarly, facial expressions that an anchor might portray. Smiling at the Governor's reelection victory, sad that the Asian markets are going down. There's no place for it."

"At Channel 4 we recently instituted a new procedure in which an outside consultant watches every single news program over a period of time, and for each of those programs rates pluses and minuses based on fairness, accuracy, and balance. He then puts together a report and passes that on to the news managers. From that we can see concretely what we did wrong or right, and from there we can pass that on to those who may be under us, all towards an effort of making it fairer."

Lou Boccardi, President of the Associated Press, argued that the press' credibility depends on strengthening its commitment to impartiality--not on drifting away from it. And he defined this notion of journalistic objectivity succinctly: are the facts accurate, is the reporting fair and is it free from ideological bias or partisanship?

"Fairness and impartiality are like obscenity: hard to define, but I know it when I see it....We, and more importantly our audience, I think, have a sense of when we are fair and when we are not...

"You start the day deciding what you will cover, so already judgments have been made. The question is, are those judgments made in an impartial and fair a way as you can, or are they made from an ideological bias that distorts what you're going to do that day?

"[Striving for impartiality or objectivity] does not consign to AP to a meaningless blather of he said/she said journalism that leaves everybody ...awash in information, but bereft of understanding. That is not what we mean by objectivity, fairness, or impartiality.

"We see the core of objectivity as freedom from bias or prejudice. It does not mean freedom from impact ... from the capacity to outrage, or from helping a reader to understand complex issues.

"I'm very uneasy with the urging of those who say it's time to cast off this old, outmoded straightjacket. It's not a straightjacket. I'm persuaded, on the contrary, that a large part, not all, but a large part of the estrangement that all the polls confirm between us and the audience is rooted in a sense that many of them have that we're just not fair.

"The answer for mainstream newspapers and broadcasters, in my view, is not more opinion in news or more personalized journalism....We put ourselves at enormous risk if we move away from core standards of accuracy, impartiality and fairness.

"At the modern AP we think you can investigate, you can analyze, you can explain, and all the while remain true to a standard of impartiality...We recently carried a story from the Middle East, an analysis of the predicament that Netanyahu finds himself in....written by a correspondent [with] two decades [overseas]...It spoke with the authority that this correspondent has, the understanding that he has.

"How do we make sure we practice what we preach? Every day, 10,000 to 15,000 editors look at what we do... We train our staff endlessly on principles of fairness, getting both sides, keeping our personal points of view out of copy. We use memos, e-mails, letters, publications, newsletters, all manner of keeping the staff's eye focused on exactly where we want to be on the question of impartiality."

At the Chicago forum in November, Jack Fuller, President of the Chicago Tribune Publishing Co., argued that the "progressive era invention" of neutrality as a journalistic responsibility also came "at a time already the boisterous multitude of voices in communities was beginning to narrow down, putting greater responsibility on those voices that remained." Fuller asked, "If we're lurching into a period in which we have a multitude of voices, fragmented all over the place, and people desperately trying to reach an audience, I wonder whether the old progressive era ideal has much validity? And if you do away with it, then what is the right idea? I don't have an answer."

In New York, Maggie Gallagher, the author and conservative Universal Press syndicated columnist for the New York Post, offered an idea of the sort about which Fuller was asking. Gallagher did not see herself as impartial, but clearly distinguished herself as a journalist rather than an activist. Why? Because she embraced the notion of being fair and accurate to the facts, of maintaining distance from party or faction, of keeping an allegiance instead to readers, and of a belief that there is something called practical truth. In a sense, Gallagher was offering a theory of journalism based not on impartiality but on the motive to inform honestly rather than manipulate.

"In what sense am I a journalist at all? It's a question that's important to me, because I do think that [I face] some of the same questions, not of impartiality exactly, but related questions that have to do with what is my relationship to my sources and to the events, and what is my relationship as a journalist to my audience. There are three criteria that I use and remind myself of in my ambition to remain a journalist, though one with a point of view.

"One is an ultimate commitment to the truth....None of us is God, but a commitment to the truth ... especially as an opinion journalist, means that I don't relate anything to my readers that I don't believe is true. That's the difference between a journalist and a propagandist. I don't seek to manipulate my audience. I seek to reveal, to convey to them the world as I see it within the limits of my understanding and with some sense, along with the conclusions of the pathways to those conclusions.

"The second related ideal that I live with in my work is fairness. Fairness is not the same thing as impartiality. One can be a partisan, an opinion journalist, and still believe that one has a high obligation to be fair to those with whom one disagrees. It's related to the sense of obligation to one's audience. Not to descend into propaganda means to accept that you have an obligation to report fairly and with particular scrupulousness, the opinions of those with whom you disagree ...

"Finally, ...I, as an opinion journalist feel a strong obligation to always speak as if I might persuade someone who disagrees with me. That is to say, I assume that the reason we are speaking at all is that there is some such thing as truth, that speaking to each other and listening to each other can help us turn this sort of random rush of events, interpret it in a way that gets us closer to the truth. The alternative way of speaking, which [talk radio people] often use, is really more akin to rallying the troops, preaching only to the choir, denouncing the evils of the world in such a way that anyone who doesn't agree with you already is going to find incomprehensible as well as unattractive. That really is the function of a propagandist, not a journalist.

"...The more a journalist views himself as a participant in the events and has a loyalty to sources, the less able he or she is to really consider himself a journalist. . . [And as an opinion journalist, which is to say you are emotionally invested in the outcome of the events] it becomes [even more] important ... to be open with the reader, to make it clear to the audience what your views are and what your biases are.

"....A journalist views himself as being in the service of the whole community. His audience is the whole community....

"That means, of course, there are always exceptions to the "no take side" rules. I don't know of any local news broadcast that is objective or impartial between, say, the criminal and the crime victim.

"Similarly, when we were at war felt there was no contradiction between objectivity and patriotism. Precisely because the whole community understood, as 99.9 percent of Americans, would be served by that point of view.

"....I think there's one other internal test you can use to determine whether or not you're staying within the boundaries of what can be fairly called journalism....I think it's possible to be an honest journalist and be loyal to a cause. It's really not possible to be an honest journalist and to be loyal to a person, a political party, or a faction....

"I say that [because of] my basic believe that there is some relationship between journalism and one's perception of the truth. One can believe that certain things. . . would be good for America and can openly state that, but to be loyal to a political party, a person or a faction means that you do not see your primary goal as commitment to speaking the truth to the people who are your audience. There's a fundamental conflict of loyalty there.

"One other point. The two kinds of diversity which we do need more of in newsrooms are, first of all, more religious diversity. Journalists are overwhelmingly secular and America is overwhelmingly not. And second, greater ideological diversity. We need this not just to be fair but in order to actually get the story to the community."

Jim Carey: Isn't there a problem with establishment bias in the mainstream press, which makes it "well nigh impossible ...for minority political voices to get into the news, to be heard, and their proposals (to be) taken seriously?"

Bill Keller: "...I don't think that's a problem of partiality. There's a problem of cynicism, a tendency not to take what any politician says at face value; and there's, I guess, an establishment bias which is what tends to squeeze out views that we deem to be on the margins or in the extreme. I think there's a predisposition to think that if a point of view is worth covering it will find a following first....

"When I say...there is an establishment bias I don't mean that we have a particular love, affection for, or often even respect for official pronouncements of the two political parties. I'm thinking more in terms of a kind of intellectual laziness than a predisposition. It's easy to take the stuff that comes at you from institutions. Maybe it's more of an institutional bias."

Lou Boccardi: "If you're going to say that we're all beholden to the establishment you're going to have to find some way to explain phenomena such as Vietnam coverage, coverage of the civil rights movement, the emergence of the women's movement, Watergate."

Bill Keller: "I agree that some of the most distinguished moments in American journalism have been when reporters have stood up to the establishment. [And] I think as a rule ... we should hold institutions up more and ask whether they're doing what they're supposed to. But I think in most of the cases that you mention, the first reporters to report on the failures of Vietnam, the first reporters to detect something rotten in Washington during Watergate, encountered an enormous bias within their own institutions that they had to then overcome before the prevailing tendency was to attack the official line."

Maggie Gallagher: "The more common complaint about journalism is that it undermines people, that it undermines everything that it touches. At the same time, people are themselves deeply cynical and disaffected, [but] they don't enjoy it. I'm not sure that journalism is capable of healing those particular sets of breaches.

"I also don't think that it's the purpose of journalism to widen the political discourse, at least in mainstream journalism...I think those who would like to widen the political discourse of this country have to do their own organizing, find alternate means of getting their message out, and recruiting. It's really not the function of journalists to do that.

"The reason opinion is constricted in this country relative to other countries, is that Americans still have far more in common with each other than people in many other places, and this is probably not a bad thing."

Tom Rosenstiel, vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, asked: "How do you decide at your news organizations that this story requires more [interpretation] than that other story? And how do you signal that at all to your readers?"

Bill Keller: "We have ... begun thinking in terms of a news analysis at the early stages of a complicated story, and probably not to think of that in terms of a pretty straight forward, something-happened-today story. A more prolonged story, one that happens over several days where things seem first to be going one way and then the other way, (also calls for an interpretive approach)....For a day or two you can report what happens, but then you've thrown so much information at people that you owe them a little help in sorting it all out. So you try to write some historical pieces and you try to write some analytical pieces."

Lou Boccardi: "One of the things we try to watch out for is the assumptions that get built into stories by the second or third day, the things that on Monday you were very carefully reporting as the potential or the point of view of some fragment. By Wednesday it's a given. It's a participial clause in front of the rest of a sentence about whatever happened on Wednesday. I think that's a danger that objective journalism faces."

Tom Rosenstiel: "How do we signal that to readers?"

Phil O'Brien: "Labeling is the preferred method. ...The anchor would ...say this is an analysis of this issue".

Bill Keller: "Often ...it's a close call whether you put that label on or not... I would tend in most cases to err on the side of putting the label on...But since we encourage reporters to try to provide some context in the course of a story, to throw in that paragraph...that will help the reader understand what it means, we often end up with stories that don't carry a label, but do carry a fairly high content of interpretation analysis."

Jim Carey: "We're avoiding the real issue here. When the press declared its independence in the 1890s or so, there were two political parties ... and there was a progressive movement. The press said let's get outside of the political parties, we'll identify with the progressive movement. We'll be for good government, for reform and against corruption, we'll try to get rid of the big city machines. It had all these values which it espoused, essentially the values of the progressive movement. Independence and objectivity meant being aligned with this movement.

"The problem is now that people don't belong to the political parties. They, in fact, find the political parties essentially opposed to their interests, and they think television and the press are in bed with the political parties and the other established interests."

Maggie Gallagher: "The difference between now and the 1890s, I suspect, is that that great declaration of the press on the side of the progressive movement was also a market-driven measure. That is to say you had at that time institutional interests which were blocking measures which were widely popular. Therefore, the press could do good and make money and sustain institutions like newspapers at the same time."

Lou Boccardi: "Jim, ...I think you crossed the line between taxing us with the responsibility to report to society and the responsibility to go out and reshape it to our liking."

"Certainly speaking for us, we think it's our responsibility ... to describe, to report, to try to help people understand what's out there, but not to...decide this is the vision and we're going to make sure it happens."

Question: "There are some revisionist thinking on allowing journalists to participate to some limited extent in the civic life of their community. What are the politics in respective organizations?"

Lou Boccardi: "Restrictive... Certainly anything that has a partisan tinge to it would be outside the line."

Phil O'Brien: "Our policy is (restrictive) as well, although if by participation in the civic life it means going to church, it means volunteering for charitable work, it means being involved in those sorts of projects, there's not a prohibition."

Bill Keller: "I don't know where some people have the time to do any of these things. . . . But there is no restriction with us as far as being a member of a church, being involved in your child's PTA or school board, but beyond that I think it's dangerous turf."

Question: "Do all the panelists agree that journalists should not display happiness or applaud a civic success story? Do journalists ever display grief at a community tragedy? Or must the issue always be disconnected in a dispassionate chronicle? Is ‘gotcha' the only available emotion?"

Phil O'Brien: "...If the journalist has done a good job of reporting, the elements themselves will express that, will emote that. The pictures, the sound bites, the facts. You don't need the journalist as some extra ingredient."

Lou Boccardi: "One of the things that you see in some of the surveys is...that reporters seem so dispassionate that they don't care...There's room to convey in an objective and fair, unbiased story, some sense of the tone and the nature and the humanity of the event. That's part of the story, after all."

Bill Keller: "We often try to capture, and even maybe elicit in the reader, the prevailing emotional response. Look at the best writing ...after the Oklahoma City bombing....A lot of it was designed by the writer to make the reader feel what he was feeling...what everybody around him was feeling."

Lou Boccardi: Which was, I would submit, in a sense the truth of the event, and that's okay. That's allowed.

Question: "Most analysts drift toward political motivations. Journalists seem comfortable with that. What inhibits journalists from writing that a President, a Senator, a Governor adopts a policy because it's a good idea, that research supports it, that it could be the truth?"

Bill Keller: "There is a tendency... Some of it's encouraged by the much-overstated and much-maligned post-Watergate syndrome. A sense that you get credit in the business for exposing an ulterior motive... Particularly reporters who are unsophisticated about it will look at a politician's introducing a piece of legislation, look at the campaign contributions, and write the story in such a way that it automatically assumes that the only conceivable reason the person would have introduced that bill was that he got a campaign contribution."

Jim Carey: "There are a number of questions that try to get at this fairness in reporting on gay issues, which means by seeking balance, one. This often entails finding a reverend who labels and damns the group debasing the issue and a discussion of it; or fairness in reporting on creationism. How does journalism deal with these pressures and the tendency to polarize positions and to give voice to what many consider irresponsible opinions?"

Lou Boccardi: "Reporting of creationism or gay issues or abortion or gun control are areas where the mandate for fairness is especially strong and ...difficult to execute... I don't think it makes you unfair if you interview somebody who's on one end of a spectrum on a controversial public issue. It probably strengthens the story.

"It would strengthen our kind of story."

Maggie Gallagher: "It's funny. It does show you the difference a point of view makes.

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