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Responding to @TomRosenstiel 's thread about @WesleyLowery's piece in @nytimes on journalistic objectivity. https://twitter.com/irwin/status/1275785628018528256?s=20 First of all, this thread is catnip to me, so thank you, Tom. A couple of things it made me think about:
1/ how much trouble I have with the word “neutrality” in conversations about journalism. It seems to me there is no such thing as neutrality here - because to claim "neutrality" is to take a position: the position of deciding not to get involved.
Wes’s comparison of “officer-involved shooting” vs “the police shot someone” makes the point exactly. What is considered “neutral” in too many newsrooms is just choosing to support the status quo -
- to align oneself with power, while not having to take responsibility for doing so: ‘hey, It's not my fault. I’m neutral.
2/ Choosing to be on the side of power is more the history of mainstream newspapers than not, whether actually advocating and participating in violence against people of color in the 18th and 19th centuries or hiding behind the screen of “neutrality” in the mid-20th.
I think that's one of the unacknowledged problems of the newspaper industry, and one reason (among many, obviously) the industry is collapsing. What @jayrosen_nyu means, I think, when he talks about the problems of 20th c "professionalism" in journalism
3/ To Wesley’s anecdote about being a cub reporter, I did a workshop with a mid-sized newsroom a couple years back on how they covered “crime.” After they realized that what they meant by “crime” was street violence (and not white collar crime or corruption)...
...they realized that their “crime” stories usually only included quotes from the police or gov't officials and almost never from community members. Yes, the reporters are overworked and filing on deadline but it’s also an unspoken allegiance to power in newspaper culture.
All the reporters in the room were horrified. They honestly hadn't seen the bigger picture of their own process.
The answer cannot be that everything is subjective, that if you FEEL it, it's true. That's a path to demagoguery. "Free" societies have to be grounded in literal truth. I really share your concern there, Tom.
Surely the goal is for newspapers to re-align their allegiance away from the powerful and to the people in their communities. And surely the question is what needs to be place for that to happen?
