In a recent post , I highlighted the following claim about journalism:
The breakdown of journalistic conventions about point of view. In an earlier era these standards — favoring austere, stoical language conveying voice-of-God authority — were designed in part to ensure that stories betrayed no hint of the writer’s real feelings.
But the convention was a pretense. There is a generally laudable move toward more conversational — and more candid — language in stories. This shift allows a respected pro like the Associated Press’s Ron Fournier to unsheathe a knife and write this sentence earlier this year about Mitt Romney: “The former Massachusetts governor pandered to voters, distorted his opponents’ record and continued to show why he’s the most malleable — and least credible — major presidential candidate.”
I’d like to pick up a couple of threads from this – one is the generally laudable move toward more conversational and more candid language. Is this a top down or bottom up move? I’ll argue that it is a bottom up move, as journalists first push and then find that editors will let pass more and more conversational and candid language in stores. Of course, by candid I mean biased. i.e. representing the candid views of the journalist. At first you read stories where the reporters voice would be cloaked by euphamisms such as “experts say” – without ever naming a single expert who said any such thing. Now you just read the reporter in so called objective news stories not just unsheathing the knife, but sticking it in and then twisting it. So let’s be honest about the new honesty, you aren’t reading factual coverage anymore, you’re reading opinion from cover to cover. And editors let this pass because it conforms to their own prejudices.
And on to the second thread – why did objective journalism sicken and die when it did? Objective journalism was good for the business of journalism. Our new candid journalism has been terrible for the business of journalism but has done wonders for the egos of journalists.
But why can you pick up a newspaper today and find editorializing in every news story where 30 years ago you would find straight news?
I’d say first liberals within the media, just like at universities, became predominant by first making the environment chilly for conservatives and then flat out not hiring them. Now that we have an overwhelmingly liberal media, why not drop objectivity? It’s not like a conservative AP writer is going to be able to unsheath the knife, let alone stick it in a twist it because they don’t exist. Nor is there a conservative editor or fellow journalist to privately dispute the liberal view in newsrooms. There is simply no hope of a group that is overwhelming composed of individual liberals to produce a product that is anything other than overwhelming liberal. The old convention didn’t break down because it didn’t suit the consumers of news, it broke down because it didn’t suit the producers of news.
The move to objective journalism was driven by concern for the bottom line – an objective AP could sell stores to any newspaper, an objective newspaper could sell itself to any subscriber. The move away seems to be driven by demographics within the profession itself.
