Can Journalism Be Impartial? Session 2: Bias, Cynicism, Superficiality, and Elitism

Dick Harwood, the Washington Post media columnist, began the second session, which examined more closely how the press may fail to live up to its goals of impartiality, with a look at the history of objectivity and the views of a century of its critics. Objectivity was never a carefully articulated or rigorously examined theory, he noted. It began because owners saw more money in making their papers more accurate and non-partisan. But from the start critics saw deep limits to objectivity. News, they said, was different than knowing what events mean, and today, the press increasingly seems to fail to make this distinction, a problem intensified as the press becomes more of a subculture of the elite.

"Jim Carey suggested that [objectivity] rose out of the thoughtfulness and concern of journalists. But in fact ... it came from the top. Several very famous owners -- [Joseph] Pulitzer and E.W. Scripps and [Adolph] Ochs -- decided that it was in their economic interest to have credible newspapers, so they began demanding a far greater degree of accuracy than they had been accustomed to."

"I'm going to quote Pulitzer. 'It is not enough to refrain from publishing fake news or to take ordinary care to avoid mistakes. You've got to make everyone connected with the paper believe that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.'

"Ochs talked about the need to give the news impartially, `without fear of favor.'

"Scripps instructed his managers to 'always see that the news report is handled objectively, as far as it is humanly possible. You must not be biased or take sides in controversies.'

"That was pretty revolutionary language at that time, because it referred to a business and to practices that had been famously partisan and unreliable since the first newspaper appeared in this country. Nevertheless, the need for objectivity became a popular theme in those early trade publications and early journalism schools at the start of the century, and the idea became a cardinal and often unexamined principle in most of the newsrooms of America."

"One of the early skeptics was Walter Lippman who, after some considerable thought, came to the conclusion which I think we can all agree with: that news and truth are not the same animal. The function of news is to call attention to an event. The function of truth, Lippman said, was to make a picture of reality on which man can act."

"The journalist at the New York Times told us the other day that the New York Giants lost a football game by a score of 20-8. Now that was a small piece of truth. But the story of why the Giants lost can be told in 100 different ways. Each story being written through a different lens that is fogged over by stereotypes and personal predilections.

"I noticed that Bill Keller said this morning that in an analysis you want a reporter to tell you whether the Reno decision hurt or helped Gore. The question I would have, how would this reporter know? How would he know?

"Versions of the Lippman critique have been summarized by Michael Schudson [in] "The Discovery of the News." One version of Lippman stated that, 'The content of a news story rests on a set of substantive political assumptions whose validity is never questioned. Journalists,' he said, 'acquire these assumptions from their own upbringing, from fellow journalists who constantly check and tutor their news judgments, and from the officials they regularly report on.'

"Jack Newfield said, 'The men and women who control the technological giants of the mass media are not neutral, unbiased computers. They have a mindset. They have definite lifestyles and political values, which are concealed under a rhetoric of objectivity. Among these unspoken but organic values are belief in welfare capitalism, God, the West, puritanism, the law, the family, and so forth.'

"I can't think of any White House correspondents or network television analysts who doesn't share these values, and at the same time, who don't insist they are totally objective."

"Other critiques of objectivity have focused on the conventional forms and processes of news -- how we write stories, and the conventions of journalism. And they construct an image of reality, Schudson tells us, which reinforces official viewpoints.

"A somewhat different approach to this question was taken in 1937 by Leo Rosten who published a landmark sociological study of the Washington correspondents. It focused on personality traits and class origins. 'Objectivity in journalism,' he concluded, 'is no more possible than objectivity in dreams. What the newspaper man tells, what he considers worth telling, and how he tells it are the end products of the social heritage; a functional relationship to his superiors -- the editors and publishers; and a psychological construct of desire, calculation, and inhibition.'

"The correspondents, who he found were children of the bourgeoises were drawn to journalism by the opportunity to project personal hostilities and feelings of injustice onto public persons under the aegis of journalistic duty. They had inner-drives for power and action that led them to secret lives of intense political involvements behind the scenes. Their newspaper careers are an amateur sport by comparison with their unknown and unwritten activities, and he gave many examples.

"In more recent years there have been other efforts to classify and explain journalists and their particular biases in terms of personality and class loyalties. A German sociologist a few years ago, Helmut Schelski, described a salvationist personality ... characteristic of European journalists. This salvationist believes that the world ultimately can be fixed, but it can't be fixed unless...you trash the hell out of...the status quo. So you have a vested interest in negative news.

"The other point he made was that in trying to identify with what may have been or may not have been problems of the working class, the salvationists in European journalism don't realize that the next class conflict is going to be between them and the workers. [The reason is that] journalists, as is the case in the United States, don't produce anything except meaning, and the meanings they produce are not necessarily acceptable to the people who have hard hands and produce goods and do the dirty work of society. So he thinks the meaning producers are going to replace capitalists as the enemy of the working class."

"A similar prospect is held out in the United States in the writings -- it's in non-Marxist terms--of Robert Reich, Christopher Lasch, Charles Murray, and others. Their focus is on what is called the cognitive elite. That is this 20 percent minority of the labor force who are educated in our most selected universities ... who control the international flow of money and information; they preside over the philanthropic foundations...the institutions of higher learning, ...the instruments of cultural production--including the mass media--and thus set the terms of public debate. Reich calls them symbol analysts, which is another phrase for meaning producers....

"Journalists, as members of this cognitive elite, derive their world views, mindsets and biases, from their peers. Their work is shaped to suit the tastes and needs of this new upper class. I must say there's a lot of evidence that the mainstream press is staking its future on this class because it's increasingly going upscale...and rejecting or losing working people, lower income people....

"The New York Times, courting advertisers, is running ads all over the world saying that its readers are the "most intelligent, affluent and influential in the country." Not most representative, or not a voice of the people....

"Other papers are doing the same. The Economist tells advertisers, "We choose not to write to a broad, lowest common denominator readership. Those that benefit from reading The Economist are those who are in the enviable position to make decisions, call for action, and elicit change." This is the audience for PBS and NPR.

"Even the networks: Peter Jennings of ABC was recently accused of too much soft news. He said, 'A year or so ago we decided we were going to be more populist, but to put it nicely, I don't think it helped us. It blurred our identity.'

"I will close with a quote from Morris Ernst, a civil liberties lawyer who represented the Newspaper Guild in the 1930s. In a legal brief he noted, 'The Constitution does not guarantee objectivity of the press, nor is objectivity obtainable in a subjective world. The question really raised is not whether news shall be unprejudiced, but rather whose prejudices shall color the news.' I think that's where we are today."

Congressman Barney Frank, (D-Mass.), as moderator Deborah Howell noted in her introduction, had remarked elsewhere that he's getting the best press of his life, and he doesn't like it. " I get much more attention for three wise cracks and a point of order than I get for a full compromise to a difficult legislative solution." Expanding on that, Frank charged the press with a profound cynicism that distorts reality, inaccurately infers sinister motives to people in public life, and depresses faith in the system. Journalists, he said, seem less concerned with trying to tell the truth than with using public events, knowingly or not, to portray their own preconceived picture, or take, of the world.

"I come to you as a very disappointed lover. To newspapers, in particular. When I think of the press I still think of newspapers."

" I'm not much of an expert or fan of TV news, particularly local news, by the way. I would think if the choice was between watching local TV news and doing something else: Dick Tracy had better characters, they were both all about crime, and I thought Tracy was better drawn."

"I was delighted to hear about the formation of the committee, and this notion that yes, what journalists have is not simply a mandate to entertain, but a self-assumed responsibility...to help democracy function. To give people the information which they need to make informed decisions."

"I have to say that as a whole, the journalistic profession does this very important job, in my judgment, quite badly. I simply do not recognize today the world I live in and work in when I read about it most of the time in the newspapers. I recognize some specific events, but I don't recognize the general thing, and I think there's been a deterioration...."

"When I am called these days by a reporter, in the first place, it is almost always to validate opinions already formulated. I am rarely asked for information from people who just want the information for its own sake. If I don't tell them what they want to hear, we may have a little argument. Then if I tell them something that is quite counter to what they had decided to write, it doesn't appear...."

"When the Democrats became the minority in 1994....That put me in [a] kind of up front, negative confrontational role, and I got the best press of my life... Saying something that embarrassed one of the Republican leaders got me more press than working hard on a legislative solution...."

"Objectivity, obviously, is a difficult issue. I think there is a severe lack, however, of the kind of objectivity we could ask for. Obviously, people's personal biases and values are going to be in there, but just because you can't make it totally pure doesn't mean you shouldn't try to screen out the grossest problems. And I'm not talking about ideological bias. I think the arguments about the press being left wing biased or right wing biased are just wrong...What the press is biased about, they're just too negative. There was this general assumption that things are done badly...."

"The fact is that we almost balanced the budget while you weren't looking."

"Stories are news when they're bad news but not when they're good news...."

"In the 1990s, after the S&L scandals, we had predictions from journalists that there was going to be a terrible set of failures in the commercial bank field. In fact the Washington Post even put out a booklet of its stories saying after the November 1992 election, you wait and see what happens....As soon as the election was over, all the commercial banks were going to fail. We passed a bill to try and deal with the commercial bank situation...."

"What happened? There were no bank failures in 1993. I think none. We never had such a good year. In fact commercial bank failures have been a virtually non-existent aspect of the American economy for the past five years. They were simply, flatly wrong....The fact that the bad news didn't happen was apparently not news."

"Success is a story. The failure ... ever to write about success, the bias that says only bad stories are news...puts a systematic bias against printing examples of where government action is successful...."

"The environment is full of success stories. Thirty years ago, if you were a four year old kid living around here, your chances of getting brain damage because of the ingestion of lead were very high. Today those chances are very, very low because of government action. Because we took lead out of gasoline and we went after lead paint on the walls. You can't read that anywhere."

"So I first want to just confront this notion that well, good news is not news. It would be in a rational world because if you only give people bad news then the general public attitude will be shaped to think only bad things happen."

"An individual instance of good news is not news, but the overall pattern is."

"Now we're beginning to see that. [Positive] crime news has become [news] lately [because] crime is down. But there are a lot of other things out there that haven't...."

"I work with people in the Congress of the United States who on the whole are there because they have views about public policy and want to implement them. Electoral considerations are a constraint on those views and they are for some people more of a constraint than others. Although I will give you another aside: Most of the polls that I hear about are taken by the media. The media likes to denounce us for being poll driven. But I haven't taken a poll since the last time I did something really stupid and we needed to know what my voters thought about it, which was 1989."

"When I read the press, almost always the analysis is political....Will Gore be helped or hurt by the Reno decision? I heard much more of that on television than whether or not the Reno decision was correct legally or not. What was in the Independent Counsel Statute, and should it be changed or not? What is the best way to deal with this?"

"I've had reporters say to me it's not my job to give your propaganda. Well, yeah, I think it is. I think it is your job to give the conflicting rationales for public policy, in part, so the public can know what they are. Of course this is at its most extreme in the horse race focus, in the reporting of elections. If you are a very conscientious citizens, it can be very hard reading the press and probably even worse watching television to know what the candidates' positions are on the issues. That's treated as if it's just a non-factor...."

"What we've got...are biases that say people aren't very good and aren't very decent. You get a degradation of our capacity as a people to come together and deal with problems that can only be dealt with if we deal with them in a collective way."

Deborah Howell, the Washington Bureau Chief of Newhouse Newspapers, asked: "Give me three or four stories coming out of Congress that you think have not been covered."

Rep. Barney Frank: "One is this question of the interest rates. That has been an enormous story, and has had major impact on the society. There's a concept that the economists call the NAIRU, the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. The concept is if unemployment gets below it, you have to raise interest rates. That has probably gone from six percent in their conception to about five percent...There's been this great debate about whether or not we should raise interest rates. The financial pages largely ignore it...."

"The next one has to do with the military budget. Bill Cohen has finally gotten the message so now people are starting to write about it. Congress has passed by overwhelming votes, legislation demanding that the Europeans pay more of the share of our common military expenditure. We passed overwhelmingly a bill to limit what American spends for NATO requiring the Europeans to do more....And this whole notion of burdensharing just got ignored...."

"The third story that was badly reported was the basis for the liberals' opposition to Fast Track. It had very little to do with campaign contributions. If you look at the money that's on the side of business and the money that's on the side of labor, that's just silly."

Deborah Howell: "Dick, do you think Barney's right, or do you think he's full of it?"

Dick Harwood: "I think he's basically right. I'm not suggesting that, like the Europeans, reporters are necessarily salvationists, but there's a lot of that here....I must say if you will look at the Pulitzer prizes and the Sigma Delta prizes and all the big prizes, who do they go to? They don't go to somebody writing hey, look at this great interest rate situation, or the fact that we've got low unemployment and no inflation. Quite the contrary. It will go to the Washington Post for saying all the goddamn banks are going to collapse within the next 48 hours. So this is built into our industry. It's part of our culture."

"I've often argued, along with other people in the last couple of years, we give a totally distorted picture of black Americans in the newspaper. You read the newspaper, you think every black in America is on welfare, drugs, or is starving to death when in fact the economic, educational, social, cultural progress of blacks in America is a hell of a story. It's really a remarkable story. But again, it doesn't get told."

Deborah Howell: "You were at the Washington Post all those years. What did you do to try to counter it?"

Dick Harwood: "I was a great proponent of it when I was at the Post, because everybody wanted to be "an investigative reporter" or everybody wanted to have his stories treated seriously, and whatever. So I was a great sinner, that's what I did about it. When I became the ombudsman, I started, I suppose hypocritically, attacking everybody else for doing it. But that goes with the job, too."

Tom Rosenstiel: "Barney, you said that increasingly when reporters come to you they want you to validate some preconceived opinion that they want to put in their piece. And it's negative. What's gone on that's caused this?"

Barney Frank: "I'm not in the newsrooms...so I am inferring the causes from the consequences, which is dangerous sometimes, although it doesn't deter you, why should it deter me?"

"I don't think the journalists here are separate from the society... I think you are part of a trend which, however, you reinforce."

"You had this period from 1945 to the early '70s when the United States as a result of World War II had a degree of superiority over the rest of the world that was unsustainable.... What began in the mid to late '70s with the oil crisis but kept going was America's margin over the rest of the world was dropping. That had negative consequences for a lot of people...."

"Then, of course, came Vietnam, America's most conspicuous international failure, and Watergate, this terrible abuse of the presidency, and we shifted from basically being an optimistic country to being a self-questioning country...."

"Then these things ... get self reinforcing....Where is it written in any kind of logical system that an investigative reporter should be such a great thing as opposed to other kinds of reporters?...If you thought things were generally going well, you would want to sort of chronicle that."

Tom Rosenstiel: When did you begin to see this phenomenon of what some people call "take" journalism, of reporters coming to you with a story already decided and looking for you to fill in the blanks?

Barney Frank: "I think it starts in the late '70s into the early '80s....I've had some older reporters tell me this, that they do find that younger people in the profession are more inclined to come with their knives out looking for bad stuff."

Dick Harwood: "As a young guy going into journalism, living in the benighted South where we had a pretty tough political system, we looked on the federal government as sort of a utopian kind of world where people were employed on their merit and they had great expertise, they were highly respected out in the country....It was a whole conception of what the government was doing.

Audience Question: "My name is Betty Dobson. I rushed over here on my lunch hour because I wanted to find out what you white people were going to be talking about with regards to bias. I must say, Mr. Harwood, that you surprised me by indicating how blacks are covered in media. I was really surprised to hear you say that you feel the media is negative towards our concerns. You know when you're a black person, you live in this society, you start to look at some of these situations as being very personal.

"Having said that, I wonder if those of you that have these vaunted positions with media understand that continuous negative media that degrades and demoralizes black people, if you understand what it causes in the lives of African people."

Barney Frank: "In the first place I do have to say your comments about the demonization sounded very much like what Dick Harwood said."

Question: "Yes, and I congratulate him."

Question: "I'm Gene Bryan Johnson. I'm the senior news producer at WNYC Radio. I'm wondering about [our] responsibility as journalists. If we decide to report on the fact that black people, that there are examples of success for people of color, do we need to worry about the fact that some people use that as an excuse to ban affirmative action, for instance? Or do we just cover it and let the results happen?"

Dick Harwood: "I guess the whole thrust of my remarks today was that objectivity is a myth. Which doesn't mean that I disagree with the idea that you ought to recognize it and in all the ways that you can try to give a reasonably complete picture or a fair picture of reality. I do think that's our function. It's not our function to make tactical decisions whether, if I report this correctly it's going to hurt such and such a bill, or it's going to cause this or that to happen."

Barney Frank: Can I say one thing, briefly? I serve on the Intellectual Property Subcommittee and we deal with the Internet, etc. We are in severe danger of 20 years from now being a society with a lot less freedom of expression because we have these two strains of law -- speech that is written and oral and put up on billboards and even now on the side of buses in New York, [which] is protected constitutionally. But speech that's electronically transmitted, because it came out of the radio spectrum, has always been given a lesser degree of constitutional protection."

"As we progress, more and more of what we say to each other is going to be electronically transmitted. Anybody concerned with freedom of expression has got to insist that we break down that barrier [so] that whether or not speech is electronically transmitted cannot be a reason for giving it less protection than other speech, or else 20 years from now we're going to wind up with a lot less free speech in this country."

[top]