Objectivity in Journalism

that they would be very explicitly a partisan newspaper. It's only really when journalism sort of took on this strong professional and I mean professional here in terms of like the professions right, like law, accounting, jobs that are associated with university education, and a class identity, that it started to assert this kind of it's an attempt to appear rational and scientific in its methodologies, right. And one of the ways that journalism did this was to talk about objectivity.

I should indicate here that objectivity is supposed to be a means of verifying information. I like that we should objectively check that what we have written is correct.

doesn't mean that that's the only thing I report. For example, if the person they maceed is somebody who has been like harassing those individuals online for weeks, or has been doxing them or assaulted them at previous like, all of that is like relevant context, but it doesn't change what objectively happened in that instant, right, Like, it's not on me to pretend that I think these sides are equal,

but it is on me to accurately report like what happens. Yes, And I think one of the one of the areas in which a lot of people, especially when we were talking about, like, you know, situations like this, a lot of folks in kind of legacy media get stuff wrong is they think that all that matters is what happens in that moment, right, and what happened previously, what's happened in other engagements, what's happened like over you know, the last two or three years of however long the conflict's

been going on that city is immaterial. Well, all that matters is what happened in the second when that reporter was scene. And if you're if you're thinking that way, you're going to miss more than someone who comes in with just an outright bias, you know.

not old, but getting that way. And it also has been the domain of like capital in the state, right, like Jeffrey Bezos owned several newspapers pro market biases, pro capitalism biases, pro state biases, that those are not really investigated much in the media in the way that other

biases might be. Right, It's also created this idea that the media always needs to shoot for the middle in any given discussion, which I kind of want to investigate a bit, when Donald Trump says something which is overt, like Donald Trump has said things which are nativist, right, nativism is a form of racism. Donald Trump therefore has

said racist shit. The way that this is far too often treated in the legacy media is it's the racist shit that Donald Trump said, correct, or like, maybe we should consider this racist thing that so and so has said, right, rather than this shit is racist Donald Trump has said of shit that it's racist, or other members of the

Republican Party. All this serves to do is when we have a topic and the people in Congress anchor themselves on the very far right, what is acceptable discourse, the media then moves discourse to the right so that position is in the center, right, it serves to ratchet that overton window to the right. I'm demonstrating this for my colleagues with hand signals, which of course only two of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to me will be able to see the right way to our podcast.

we take. And I guess the most relevant one will be academia, which is something else I am unfortunate enough to have participated in for far too much of my adult life. So academia still not great, But we have accepted that everyone is biased in academia. Right, We rely on, among many other things, something called standpoint theory, right, which is a cornerstone of modern feminist thought. Most of you will be aware of it, even if you're not aware of it. Basically, it holds that we see the world

differently based on where we see it from. Our gender, sexuality, raise, ethnicity, experience, age, and a million other things impact the truth we know in the world. We experience and standpoint theory posits that perhaps people not from a certain threating may have valuable insights into it. Right, So, sometimes the outsider perspective is

a valuable one. But also people from that setting may see things outsiders may not see, and we have to acknowledge those biases, right, and then continue to tell the truth. How do we tell the truth? In academia? We do something called peer review. Peer review is bad. Peer review strongly reinforces the status quote right. I will give one example. I once had a journal article, right for a history journal,

killed in peer review. The piece was about the nineteen oh nine tour of Catalonia that was a bicycle competition for those of you who aren't familiar. It was killed because my media analysis didn't mention television coverage. The television was kind of crudely invented in the nineteen twenties, and did it become widely available until the nineteen forties, Right, Like, this is not a reasonable objection. Nonetheless, someone was able to kill my piece because of it, because that's how

peer review worked. Right. The people who are as people who are in petitions of power can kill your shit if they want to, and they can give the most ludicrous region. That is how peer of view, among other things, reinforces state just quo. Right. The other thing that we do in academias we declare our conflicts of interest, and this is something we don't do in journalism, right, Like

outlets may have a conflict of interest policy. But again, like conflicts of interest aren't explicitly declared in a piece like you wouldn't see sometimes NPR does it.

any way. And that's kind of one of the fundamental issues. Whereas, like a lot of times, a lot of outlets won't let, for example, a black journalist report on a black man being murdered by the police, right because they see that as like an inherent conflict of interest, and the gap between those two things is where a lot of the real problems, a lot of the worst problems in modern journalism arise.

what is happening in Gaza. It is a genocide to take a stance on these issues, right, And that is bad. Like journalists are human beings too, and it's ridiculous to suggest that that we shouldn't or can't have opinions on these things and still do good reporting, right we can. We just have to make sure that the reporting itself

is accurate. Sometimes what this leads to is like like what I guess another, like Rubbie, you spoke about it, that like the inherent conflict of interests that like traffic

on a website presents for journalism. Another like inherent issue is that like every source is seen as biased, right, Like you said, like black folks might not be allowed to report on black men being shown by the cops, accept state sources, which are far too often seen as speaking the verbatim truth, right, Well, this is what the

police said. Yes, yeah, that is how we get I guess A pretty good example of this, I'll link to it in the show notes is a piece I wrote five years ago I think about police officers overdosing on fentanyl. Some of you will be familiar with this, some of you will not, But it is not possible to overdose on fentanyl just from being in its presence, like in an outdoor area next to a thing that has fentel in it. The piece I wrote dealt with the San

Diego Union Tribune. Who I mean, this was a spectacular instance, I guess, of journalists like serving as police snographers. What happened here is that the police had produced an edited video with like music and shit of this supposed overdose. Right of a young cop who was like, I don't know what they call it. He's like apprentice with an older cop, like the with a more experienced cop and they were going around doing cop stuff. They found some stuff.

They tested it for fentanyl, and this guy collapses. The younger cop, the older cop gives him several nacans. It's not just waste some yeah, no, just like I think there was one instant where someone received seven knock ants, which like, like, that's a threat to your fucking nasal integrity if nothing else. Yeah, if knokin doesn't work the first time, like I.

you discuss the toxicology report in this case? That information wasn't available right the way I was able to obtain that just to do I guess clarity is first of all, I saw the publication where they didn't mention any fact

checking that they'd done. You can also pra the emails to the police as well as from the police, right, so you can see if other reporters have done fact checking that way or have asked any follow up questions that way I done, that they would have found out that you say that you can't overdose in fentanyl this way. They didn't even try. And like both sides this, I guess like sometimes you'll see outlets doing that now, like this cop overdose from fentanyl but doctors say they can't.

Like it's a which I still think is an absolutely ludicrous practice. Right. That's like saying this person tried to fly, but you know that people say gravity will make them fall to the ground, like one of these things we know to be true. So I guess what I would propose we do instead of this ludicrous practice of like pretending to be objective about everything all the time, is that we are honest about our biases, honest about our

conflict of interests. We're honest about like our standpoint, and then we do reporting, which is obviously verifiable, right, And that means, like you'll see that at the end of these episodes, right, we share our sources that we used after we're try and communicate where we got information from and how we got it. And I think we should strive for moral clarity in the way we say things instead of driving to this mill ground. So, like, what do I mean by moral clarity? I mean saying the

cops killed someone, not officer involved shooting. Right. If you work with fucking words and you find yourself writing something as convoluted as officer involved shooting, then you have strayed from the foundational reason for journalism existing. Yeah, you have gone beyond God's light. Yeah yeah, yeah, you live in the darkness. There is I think a place for fact checkers. I think people got a bit carried away with fact checking.

I don't quite know how to phrase this correctly. I had an experience once where I had written a piece. The fact checking of that piece centered on the fact that I had used the noun beach chair to refer to this chair. Yes, the fact checker believed that it was a lawn chair. To me, did not impact the overall thrust of the piece, right, like the nature of the chair. Unfortunately, that ended up killing the story. We ran out of time to go over the court documents

because of the nature of the chair discussion. And I'm not sure that's what we need to do.

what you did didn't really matter. And what we should probably be doing is looking at an intervention higher up on the line to stop the bullshit from getting out, rather than being obsessed with well I fact checked it, like, well, but that didn't really help you know, yeah, right, just at what point do we give that up?

instead of being like, no, the election wasn't solen. That that's bullshit, constantly trying to like investigate those claims as if they were credible and useful, rather than illustrating why they should be dismissed and then moving on, right like, instead of investigating why this conspiracy is so important. We see that a lot with immigration right now, but we saw it a ton in the presidential debates, right Like, It's a good example of what you were saying JD.

Vance can just lie and even Donald Trump actually can lie about people eating dogs and cats and it doesn't hugely matter if an hour later and use outlet tweets, oh, we fact check him, and it's not okay. Right, You're still broadcast to millions of people that Haitian migrants eat

dogs and cats and that's not true. And I think we need to strive for something that it's closer to the truth, and it's closer to fairness, and it gives us moral clarity because what we're all doing right now, what the legacy media doing is doing right now, is like woefully inadequate to meet the moment. Yeah, I mean I agree.

a willing agent of disinformation. That's the real issue is you can have the Washington Post, and you can have the New York Times host good reporting, but a huge amount of their income will always come from having columnists whose entire job is to piss people off or to stoke the egos of people in power. And I don't know that the good work those outlets does outweighs the crap that they spill into the public discourse, because that's

what's incentivized. And so I think to an extent, there's almost no point in actually engaging with the objectivity debate with the people who are pushing it, because they're not pushing it honestly, they're pushing it as a way to obscure the fact that they make their money the same way Mark Zuckerberg makes his money, which is by spreading fear, anger, and doubt.

But I have come to realize and in doing that, I'm doing exactly what they want me to do, which is in you sending people to their website to click on adverts and to make the money. So I think it's better that we do not do that. But yeah, that is the fundamental conceit of journalism right now. How it pays the bills is keeping you on that page, and a way it keeps you on that page is making you angry. There is like a model, I think.

Then you see this like in community small community newspapers right now, like I guess outlets like Left Coast Right Watching in California and Oregon, where like people genuinely buy building trust and telling the truth, gain the support of their communities and financed by them. But I mean the orders of magnitude and income difference are like they're not making Washington Post money over at Left Coast Right Watch. I know this should be true. So yeah, pretty fucked

and it will only get worse. I think, like, as as as we continue to slide into the post truth fascism world, I can't really our legacy outlets doing much about it. If all they ever going to do is strive for the middle ground.