The death of objectivity

By Michael Moran

I used to joke, back in my days covering the Middle East, that bias is in the eyes of the beholder. We live in a world today where that’s no longer just a joke. Indeed, today, there’s a far more challenging reality that everyone from policymakers to journalists to intelligence analyst to students are dealing with. Call it the death of objectivity.

For the past 12 years, I’ve taught a seminar at Bard College called “Writing on International Affairs.” It began in what seems like another century as a course for smart undergraduates from liberal arts colleges around the nation who aspired to be foreign correspondents someday. In the time since I began teaching it, though, the idea of encouraging a smart young person to pursue that dream seemed pretty unethical. Yes, there still are a few foreign correspondents’ gigs around, but mostly they’ve dried up over the past decade, victims of technology, corporate bean counters, and American myopia. Those still plying my old trade at places like The New York Times, Washington Post or CNN are more likely to die in them than move on to make way for new, young talent. So my course has evolved over the years to arm students with a more varied and relevant skill set. It now includes segments on blogging, podcasting, online documentary production, as well as how to write about risk, comparative and scenario analysis, or to structure memoranda. These days, that strikes me as a greater service to my students than teaching them how to write wistful dispatches from the Central Asian steppes.

But something I still hammer home in the course is the concept of objectivity – a concept that is entirely alien to the current generation of undergraduates. Once the touchstone of  journalists and policy analysts, it’s now either dismissed as “utopian” or – more often – never even enters the conversation. “Why try to do something that cannot be done?” one of my students asked. That’s a very sad attitude to have at 19 years of age.

News executives in the US now make the “fight fire with fire” argument for casting off objectivity in favor of a political. I spent some time at MSNBC back when it adhered to old school news standards – two sources, fairness, that sort of thing. The network was rewarded for its efforts with a consistent ranking of 3 out- of 3 in the cable ratings war. Since it’s decided to tack left in response to Fox News’ right, it’s had more success.

But it’s also become a part of the problem. I view its reports as biased as those coming from Fox, just from a different angle. There’s no time here to get into the deep sociological results of this trend, but suffice it to say that the 2016 election didn’t just happen by accident. It grew out of the poisonous soil of compromised information outlets that were ripe to be used, abused, and debased.

There was a time not long ago when we had arbitors of sorts to prevent this. The ‘quality’ newspapers were one source. Network news was the other. Until the early 1990s, the vast majority of the US adult population watched one of the three network nightly tv news programs – ABC, NBC or CBS. As a young copyboy at The New York Times in the early 1980s, one of my jobs was to watch them all, report on what they reported, and turn it over to the night editor in Washington – just in case they had something the Times did not. It was rare that they did, I must say. But it was also rare that the three varied much from each other. For a long time I thought that was a travesty – group think in action. But now that it’s gone, a very important leavening force has been removed from the American experience. Once upon a time, most of us were on the same page – at least for half an hour a night. Now, like fat tourists on a cruise ship buffet, we consume only what we want, and what we want is available in abundance to ensure we come back for seconds. The chefs quickly remove any dish that isn’t wildly popular.

That’s the modern media landscape in a nutshell. Driven by marketing, its integrity compromised, left and right – no exceptions. On the right, Al Franken and Matt Lauer currently plays the role of The Devil. On the left, predictably, its Judge Roy Moore and The Donald in the title role. A pox on the all. But the news will soon move on to other maleable topics. The fact is that the news is no longer being presented fairly, whether the story involves sexual harrassment, crime statistics or tax reform. Call it the Death of Objectivity.