Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 23

The Failure of Objectivity in Journalism

21

journalists in their preoccupation with acconunodating one another
(490).
Clearly, this discussion has demonstrated that the concept of
objectivity in journalism is a flawed construct that has proven
extremely difficult for journalists to incorporate within traditional
journalistic practice. The concept has created an inescapable and
insurmountable conflict between the belief that journalists must
separate facts from values and the basic realities both of human
psychology and the daily fimctioning of the journalistic enterprise.
First, journalists have been unable to ignore the influence of their
backgrounds, beliefs, and culture in an effort to prevent their
subjective realities from intruding into their work. In a hopeless
endeavor to suppress their most natural impulses, journalists have
only n\ade the sp>ecter they hoped to destroy loom larger. Second, the
everyday conventions, workways, and rhythms that journalists
follow in gathering information have made it impossible for that
information to conform to the standards of objectivity. In fact, it has
been partly the desire to follow those standards in the first place
that has created some of the conventions that cause journalists to
sometimes unintentionally distort the facts. Finally, the systems
that have evolved within liberal-democratic societies that regulate
the relationships between journalists and their sources have tended to
create other values among journalists that often conflict with and
supersede their belief in objectivity.
All this evidence and all these arguments seem to point
relentlessly to one conclusion: the belief in objectivity has become
insupportable and unworkable for contemporary journalists and
should be abandoned. However, were journalists to follow such a
course and relinquish their belief in objectivity, with what would
they replace it? This question is an extremely difficult one, because it
brings us to the fear of subjectivity, the "distrust of self” that
Schudson has found lurking so omino usly behind the belief in
objectivity throughout the twentieth century, the determination
among journalists not to perm it their opinions and attitudes to be
included along with the facts in their work. Reese has argued that
objectivity is still central to the "news paradigm" (393). Journalists
seem no more ready than ever to examine their fear of subjectivity
that leaves the principle of objectivity so firmly entrenched.