“This is real life, and real life is depressing! There is a pandemic happening, for God’s sake. Plus: Racism! Also: Climate change! And inflation! Things are depressing. You should be depressed!”[1] Familiar rhetoric, isn’t it? Statistics say that in recent years, many people refuse to read the news because they cause them depressing emotions. Moreover, even columnists and journalists with many years of experience in the media admit to themselves that they cannot read news articles because of their content.
“Biased unbiased journalism”: how the authors of American publications advocate the disclosure of stories in their articles
“Why are people avoiding the news? It’s repetitive and dispiriting, often of dubious credibility, and it leaves people feeling powerless, according to the survey… It turns out that the more news we consume about mass-casualty events, such as shootings, the more we suffer. The more political news we ingest, the more mistakes we make about who we are. If the goal of journalism is to inform people, where is the evidence it is working?”[2], – said Amanda Ripley in her essay “I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me or the product?”. The host of the Slate podcast “How To!” notes that 4 out of 10 US citizens avoid contact with notes about the events that happened (approx. – the study was conducted based on the Reuters Institute in 2022). This is because most news are negative messages that are simply “not intended for people”: a constant stream of depressing messages can lead to massive mental health problems. If earlier the media more often covered more negative events simply because they drew attention to themselves more often, now there should be more materials that inspire hope in humanity, Ripley believes.
Against this background, a very important issue of the objectivity of the mass media becomes relevant again. Indeed, they began to talk about it more and more often in the last “roaring” decade, which began with extremely significant events: a pandemic, racial movements, etc., this problem acquires new meanings due to the current revision of the “transparency of news”. According to major American publications, the current “desire for objectivity” does not allow we to talk about people’s experiences, about their experiences during the pandemic or about the experience of discrimination. As Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, notes, the modern generation of journalists should learn a new ethics of writing: not to broadcast exclusively the “naked truth”, but to rely on the sensory experience of people. Thus, the concept of “new objectivity” comes on the scene – an approach to news coverage not through facts, but through the personal perception of people and communities.
Attempts to use a new approach to this phenomenon in the American media can be seen today. Thus, ABC stations are trying to cover the life of ethnic communities by collecting information from the local population. “We have to be able to use the voices of people whose neighborhoods we don’t normally go into and tell these stories from their vantage point,” The Washington Post quoted the vice president of the ABC-owned station as saying[3].
From all this it follows that the problem of the current mass media is the opacity of news selection. Who forms them? Editors? A political agenda? Alternatively, on the contrary, the desire of the publication to be outside of it? All the same, The Washington Post offers a solution to this problem in the spirit of the current aspirations to “hear everyone’s voice.” In the material “Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ …” the idea is expressed to make any material “bilaterally transparent”. That is, the mechanism of news gathering itself should not be in doubt, and the audience of the publication should be able to ask the editorial board a question and get an answer to it. Nevertheless, the problem lies in the fact that such mechanisms and opportunities are currently more often interested in using large publications. Regional media, which are going through hard times in the United States, in this case acquire new challenges to their existence[4].
“The old version of local news had a lot more reporters than today’s, and anyone could buy a newspaper of that day with money in their pocket. However, these articles mainly reflected the point of view of the white establishment of this city and presented this point of view as objective news. Therefore, the old model wasn’t so good. What replaced it is even worse — the same documents and approach, but fewer employees,” writes Perry Bacon Jr. for The Washington Post[5] about the situation around local media.
What should the modern generation of authors do? Speak out openly and highlight issues that affect different groups of people to which they belong. Moreover, as Leonard Downie Jr.. emphasizes, we are talking not only about gender or ethnic communities, but also about social ones.
“Newsroom staff diversity should reflect the communities being covered — not just gender and ethnic diversity but also diversity of economic, educational, geographic and social backgrounds. Inclusive newsrooms should encourage their journalists to speak up and be heard by their colleagues and leaders in making decisions about coverage,”[6] Leonard Downie Jr. notes in his text. Now, while teaching students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, he constantly says that it is not the journalism that is trying to present itself as objective that deserves people’s attention, but the one that can earn trust.
Can such an approach help to cope with the problem of “escaping from the news” in the United States? A question that raises doubts among many experts. The approach was criticized by the web broadcast America Uncovered. According to its authors, the “new objectivity” will only aggravate the situation with a drop in confidence in journalism. The media should not turn away from the facts, said host Chris Chappell in the episode “Journalists say Objectivity is bad.”[7] On the contrary, the media will be trustworthy to its audience in the case of coverage of several positions, without bias in support of inclusiveness of a particular social group.
Will one of these points of view win in this confrontation? Time will tell. In the meantime, I would like to conclude this article with the words from the note on Amana Ripley’s essay, which also indicate a new turn in journalistic objectivity in America. “There must be an aspect of hope — a sense of possibility incorporated in the news. There must be a sense of agency — that something, even something small, can be done about a problem. There must be a recognition of human dignity — without that recognition, it is hard to understand why people do what they do.”[8]
Автор статьи Чернопятова Софья
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/how-to-fix-news-media/
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/how-to-fix-news-media/
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms-news-reporting-objectivity-diversity/
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/17/local-news-crisis-plan-fix-perry-bacon/
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/17/local-news-crisis-plan-fix-perry-bacon/
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms-news-reporting-objectivity-diversity/
[7] https://www.americauncovered.tv/america-uncovered-episodes/journalists-say-objectivity-is-bad
[8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/17/why-were-not-reading-news/
