According to Stephen J. Ward, a professor’ in the school of journalism at McGill University, ”hellip;abandoning all pretense of objectivity would only exacerbate journalism’s problems and open up the door to more biased reporting.’ I strongly disagree with this statement. A writer can present information and still have an opinion on the issue without being biased.
The definition of journalistic objectivity is to detach oneself emotionally from the stories one writes. It is the idea that journalists should only state the facts and try not to attach their opinion to reporting. This idea has many flaws. To not convey one’s opinion in’ one’s writing is to ask someone not to be human.
The role of a journalist is to present factual information to the public. Many critics of journalistic subjectivity believe’ that’ the writer, when applying his or her opinion, is obscuring the truth. The problem with this assumption is that opinionated writing is completely void of the original information, which it is not – the information is only highlighted by the journalist’s feeling on the topic.
A rebuttal to my point of view may be that when a journalist is subjective, the opportunity for the public to make an independent stance on an issue is taken away. This may be true for a small portion of news readers, but I would like to believe that a person interested in news would have the ability to make his own decision regardless of a writer’s subjectivity.
Supporters of journalistic subjectivity feel that’ the news industry is subjective from beginning to end. For instance, the different parts of a story that a journalist chooses to report is a part of being subjective. Before a story even gets written it is subjective in many ways. A reporter decides what questions to ask, what events should be highlighted more than others, and what quotes shall be used.
This subjectivity goes way beyond the work of a reporter. There are different standards for each individual news organization that reporters and editors must apply to their work. From the beginning production of a paper, journal, magazine and broadcast station, there is an image the producer would like to convey to the public. This is why there are so many types of informational sources in the industry.
Everette E. Dennis, from the book, ‘Media Debates,’ argues that objective news contains the ‘five ‘W’s and the ‘H.’ ‘ This is very accurate, but subjective news also’ contains these elements. Dennis feels that journalists should, and for the most part, are objective. He also states that a journalist has to make rational decisions on news gathering and making. This seems very contradictory to me.
No matter how rational the process may be the journalist is making the ultimate decision on what to report. If you have to make a priority list and decide what material will be cut, objectivity no longer exists in the story. In order for a story to be completely objective, a journalist would not go through this process, and the story would contain all the information gathered no matter how important a journalist thinks one point is over another.
The most important thing to remember is that journalists are people, and we are all conditioned and have pre-conceived views on the world. This is’ simply human nature. Reporting has been subjective since the birth of newspapers, and this style of reporting has had many impacts on our political and social system.
