Is media objectivity still taught these days? (No, not a pro-Trump or anti-Trump thread)

Great Debates
1

ISTM that one of the first casualties of the Trump phenomenon is that media objectivity is going away, perhaps forever. Now, there was never, of course, a truly unbiased media network, but in the past few weeks and months, the media is abandoning even any pretense of objectivity, or any appearance of being unbiased, and is simply hammering away in favor of, or against, Trump - hammer and tongs.

Reading Fox News and CNN on Facebook, for instance, there isn’t even a pretense of objectivity left. Fox News is unabashedly pro-Trump and CNN is obviously anti-Trump; not even a fig leaf of neutrality remaining.
I want to ask - by the time Trump leaves the presidency - be it anywhere from 1-8 years from now - if the media will even resemble anything objective or neutral by that point. Is journalistic neutrality still being taught in schools? Will it still be in the future?

2

I graduated from (what was then) one of America’s finest journalism schools more than 40 years ago. What they taught me is that while “objectivity” is often in the mind of the beholder, facts aren’t. My responsibility as a journalist was to be factual, accurate, and not put my opinions into someone else’s mouth.

To put it bluntly, objectivity is what you agree with. Bias is what you don’t.

3

Now days?
Probably not, more important what gets best ratings and pleases the advertisers and sponsors.

4

“Objective” doesn’t mean “says exactly equal numbers of good and bad things about everybody”. If a particular politician objectively has a habit of saying things that are blatantly and demonstrably untrue, and does so far more often than any of his political opponents, it would be un-objective not to report that.

“Some say Earth orbits the Sun; others say the Sun orbits Earth.”

5

The media is way more biased and but the bias has been there for a long time. Which stories are run, how the stories are run, which opinions are published, all of that trump (see what I did there?) which facts get reported.

For example right now on CNN the headline in a giant font is

over a picture of Trump. Then in smaller font

over of a picture of Trump looking angry(ish)

Meanwhile, Fox news has

in the regular font over a picture of Trump doing his open handed thing.

The CNN one clearly puts Trump in a losing position. The Fox one puts Trump in the aggressive position.

The AP has

with text after. The actual story has a small pic of some protesters.

Same story, three different articles with three very different presentations that lead to different conclusions. The CNN one is that Trump lost, Fox is that Trump is fighting and the AP one is pretty straight up.

Slee

6

Once Trump stops being “literally Hitler” the media frenzy will probably chill out and get back to normal. Unfortunately peoples’ trust in the media won’t return as quickly

7

I studied History as my primary subject area, and I can tell you that the idea of News Media being an Objective Source for what is going on in the world is an EXTREMELY recent notion.

The bulk of the history of American politics, includes candidate after candidate directly working to gain the open support of major Newspapers.

In the same way, many people don’t realize how tremendously recently it is, that the Political Parties decided to MAYBE have “real” primaries. That didn’t happen until after the end of the 1960’s.

Choosing unflattering pictures for people who they dislike, and much nicer ones for the people they like, is again, a very old trick. I noticed it even as a child, back in the early 1960’s. We had a right wing newspaper and a more left leaning one here in DC, and comparing their dramatically contradictory daily headlines every day, was a lot of fun.

Don’t worry that “objectivity will be lost forever.” As someone already mentioned, Objectivity itself is a matter of opinion.

More than that, most news organizations who get caught up with trying to APPEAR objective these days, do so by failing to report ANYTHING factually or accurately. Since Ronald Reagan’s very successful campaign against bias (only against him) in the media, the favored way for a news program to give the appearance of bias-free reporting, has been to report what each side SAID about the event or issue, but not report directly about the event itself. Thus, if the right wingers had the kickiest sound-bite on the issue at hand, their side would win the day, because their “snappy saying” would get the most airplay. If the left went too brainy or subtle or worst of all, verbose in their response, they would lose, regardless of the facts or of logical reasoning.

8

Specifically in the USA, it seemed to die with the Fairness Doctine in 1987:

9

Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. argued against the so called View From Nowhere for quite some time. He prefers that journalists drop any pretense of neutrality and embrace objectivity so long as they disclose their biases.

10

But each version is objectively accurate, i.e., Trump DID lose, he DID say “See you in court,” and the AP headline IS factual.

And CNN has a front-page link to the full text of the Court’s order, which neither Fox nor AP has. So, while one can say that CNN shows bias, they’re also the organization that makes it easiest for the reader to actually see the original source.

11

Exactly.

Trump lost, bigly!

Trump is fighting on! Also bigly!

Which of those statements is not neutral and objective?

12

As of right now, the big banner headline on CNN’s home page reads

which is the same as the Fox News headline, only larger.

While the reliably liberal MSNBC has (at this hour)

[QUOTE]
Appeals court refuses to reinstate Trump’s travel order

So what lesson about media bias do we take from this?

13

If you have any real familiarity with mainstream media or with journalism training you would know that there is a constant conversation about objectivity. The OP includes a blatant false equivalence between CNN and Fox. They are not mirror images of each other. One is actually trying to objectively inform the public. The other is a Republican Party organ.

In fact the problem that some in the mainstream media are starting to realize is that they have been making a big mistake in looking to false balance and false equivalence to define how to approach the question of objectivity.

It’s starting to become apparent that objectivity is not about balance or equivalence. It’s about reporting facts and truth and not served by setting up a lazy dichotomy between two sides and leaving at that.

If some objective news outlets are starting to openly portray Trump on a negative light it’s not because they are abandoning objectivity, but rather because that’s what the objective reality actually is.

14

These newsfeed posts from CNN and Fox News’ official Facebook pages read more like an advocacy blog than a professional news network:

CNN:
*“No one should ever go through the pain of having their mom taken away from them." Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos was taken into custody in Phoenix and deported to Mexico. Watch her daughter’s emotional speech.

Wow, that got personal. (headline: Pa. lawmaker to Trump: ‘Come after me you fascist, loofa-faced s***-gibbon’)

“Dear President Donald Trump”: Citizens from each of the 7 countries affected by the travel ban have messages for President Donald J. Trump. Here’s what they had to say.

Another morning, another Donald J. Trump tweet.

“They can shut me up, but they can’t change the truth," she said. The GOP effort to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren only amplified her message.

“The kind of people Donald Trump is sending our way – it’s like a bad movie.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren slams President Donald J. Trump’s cabinet picks.

The 4-month-old baby girl needed a life-saving procedure to treat a heart defect but was barred from the US by President Donald J. Trump’s travel ban. She’s now receiving care at an Oregon hospital.

“That’s not the America I sacrificed for. You want to be a legitimate President, sir? Then act like one.” A veteran addresses President Donald J. Trump in a powerful ad by a progressive veterans advocacy group.*

Fox News:
*
Well, this is awkward…Brian Williams was suspended from NBC News for misrepresenting events, but hosted a segment on MSNBC to talk about President Donald J. Trump’s alleged lying.

“Ted Cruz is right. The left uses race to foment hate.” Today on “America’s Newsroom,” Rachel Campos-Duffy supported the Texas senator’s remarks that the Democrats are the “party of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“When I heard police were dying and stuff, that made me start wanting to give them little notes.” A 10-year-old boy finds a way to thank police officers for keeping Americans safe.

Earlier today, Senator Tim Scott read vicious tweets he received for supporting Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.

Oops! House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said she can’t work with “President Bush” instead of President Donald J. Trump.

Liberals simply cannot accept the fact that Donald J. Trump is president and are doing everything in their power to depose him. And now, the non-acceptance has turned to sports…

Tomi Lahren, a rising star in the world of conservative commentary, joined Sean Hannity Tuesday night to discuss her political views and how she deals with attacks from the left.*

15

I don’t think so (about CNN.) Oftentimes CNN will use adjectives as a way of shaping how it wants readers to feel about a story.

Examples, from above:

*“No one should ever go through the pain of having their mom taken away from them." Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos was taken into custody in Phoenix and deported to Mexico. Watch her daughter’s **emotional *speech.

An objective story header would be: “Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos was taken into custody in Phoenix and deported to Mexico. Watch her daughter’s speech.”

Instead, by adding the word “emotional,” it’s meant to evoke sympathy in a particular slant/way.

Another example:

“That’s not the America I sacrificed for. You want to be a legitimate President, sir? Then act like one.” A veteran addresses President Donald J. Trump in a powerful ad by a progressive veterans advocacy group.

An objective story header would be: A veteran addresses President Donald J. Trump in an ad by a progressive veterans advocacy group.

Instead, by adding the word “powerful,” it’s meant to evoke sympathy in a particular slant/way.

Another example:

“They can shut me up, but they can’t change the truth," she said. The GOP effort to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren only amplified her message.

That last bolded portion was added by CNN. It is clearly intended to cause the reader to sympathize with Warren and take her stance.

16

You know what the difference is between the CNN quotes and your revised versions?

Your versions are boring.

The use of adjectives like “emotional” and “powerful” are not saying the speaker is factually correct or morally justified, they are basically saying “you gotta watch this, it’s amazing” which is nothing more or less than a commercial news outlet hawking its wares and working to push up the ever-important audience share metric.

If CNN is so “liberal” perhaps you could explain why they had such thorough and enthusiastic coverage of the second Iraq war, which many media in other nations treated with such disdain. I still remember one piece that was almost comical in its gushing enthusiasm, where CNN reporter Kyra Phillips was posted on an aircraft carrier and was practically swooning with admiration for the heroic young men flying fighter missions – it could have been used as a recruiting piece for the USAF.

So what’s going on here? It’s the same network you’re complaining about. What’s going on is described well by Noam Chomsky who characterized the media this way: “as a broad generalization, I think it is fair to say that the media adopt the basic framework of state and private power, mostly uncritically.”

Which means that CNN is, first of all, going to be loyal to its advertisers and loyal to its nation’s power bases, and underlying all that is going to be doing everything it can to drive its audience share and hence its revenues. Which is why news is constantly being sensationalized and why important news is often subservient to attention-grabbing trivia.

Fox News is just the same, but it has the additional burden of functioning as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. The only people who think CNN or the other major broadcast news outlets have a “liberal bias” are those who use Fox News as a baseline for “objectivity”.

17

None of those examples are a failure of objectivity. Emotion in a situation can be objectively observed and reported.

There is a clear difference between your CNN snippets and your Fox snippets. The Fox ones drip with contempt for the left, and several of them personally impugn the character of the subjects they are talking about in exactly the way a propagandist would.

18

From the perspective of a former newsman who used to get wound up over media bias, there is no such thing as objectivity in human affairs. The only truly objective people are dead.

There is such a thing as fairness, which has taken a severe hit over the years in both subtle and obvious ways. One of my current faves in the “subtle” category is when politicians or an organization develop a position of relative power and use it to advance their goals. If the reporter/editor doesn’t like these people, they are said to be “emboldened”. I get the image of creatures lurking in the substrata, which sense an opportunity and lunge into the light of day. Good People are never “emboldened”. :slight_smile:

I miss hard-hitting editorials. In the olden days, children, network news actually ran editorials, and some were quite good. Now, opinion is diluted through the daily run of “news” stories.