The Objectivity in News - Essay Example

Objectivity In News, Is It Possible? And If So, Is It Desirable? The media has a role of disseminating news and occurrences to the people. This should be done in an objective manner ensuring no interference from external parties. They are times when this role is compromised. Objectivity may be understood as synonymous with neutrality in the context of journalism. “The belief in objectivity is a faith in ‘facts’, distrust in ‘value,’ and a commitment to their segregation” argues sociologist Michael Schudson. So it is a key journalistic value that is guided by the principles of factuality, fairness, accuracy and truth telling (Lambert, Mariam, Susan, 2010; Calcutt & Hamond, 2011). A journalist needs to distance him/herself from the value judgments of the text so as to be objective. Civic and advocacy journalist criticize the understanding of objectivity as neutrality or nonpartisanship. They argue that it does a disservice to the public because it fails to attempt to find the truth. Such objectivity becomes very difficult to apply in certain media such as newspapers that inevitably take positions of deciding some of the stories to cover, the information to feature on the front page and even the sources to quote. There are even heavy media critics such as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky whom have shown how in practice such a notion of objectivity ends up heavily favoring the viewpoint of influential organizations such as the government and iconic enterprises (Belsey & Chadwick, 1992). Journalistic practice raises so many ethical issues. Our concern is raised on the nature and possible resolution of the issues that arise in the practice rather than the theoretical definition of a profession. The nature of professionalism is both vague and flexible, as older professions like law and medicine change and newer professions jostle for the status that professionalism brings. Most of journalistic practices should be described and analyzed on the viewpoint of sets of concepts that initially were ethical. Social scientist who study the news speak a different language that journalist do not understand. “News is what newspapermen make it,” Social scientists speak of “making news,” “constructing news” of the “social construction of reality”. For this reason even journalists who are critical of their daily practices of their organizations and even colleagues find this talk offensive. They defend their work based on the fact that they issues as they see it. There are various occasions when bias, sensationalism, inaccuracy is involved, but a responsible journalist never fakes the news. They are the experts who compose the stories which are finally called news. The need for information to enable people to play their parts as citizens of the world is indisputable, and the opportunities for the media are therefore beyond media. But, because both the politics and the technology of the media are rapidly changing in unpredictable ways, it is questions rather than answers that suggest themselves as conclusions. Who will provide, produce, edit, control and distribute the information? If its local networks, how can they provide the necessary international outlook? If it is global economy, how can they be encouraged to aims more responsible than the mere pursuit of profit? Can the media play down national, ideological and other rivalries and emphasize common humanity facing common problems? These questions raise the issue of whether the pursuit of profit or power is compatible with the quality of media? And this in turn raises the question of freedom (Tuchman, 1972). A free and vigorous press and other organs of mass media and mass communication are agreed to be among the essential ingredients to a healthy democracy. This need for media is recognized in various charters and conventions of Human Rights. In Britain, however, the media is already restricted by the laws of the land than in most other countries of the democratic world. The general laws of the land and the peculiarities of the constitution do not exhaust the legal controls over the British media. Broadcasting is subject to a number of statutory licensing and various regulating bodies such as Independent Television Commission (ITC), Radio Authority, Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCC) , and the Broadcasting Standards Council. This system of control has been for several reasons including unclear and overlapping jurisdictions. In the case of print journalism there is no statutory regulatory body (Richard & Cristina, 1996, p.159). The political economy of news is always characterized as a “conspiracy theory” or simple mindedly that there is a ruling directorate of capitalist class that dictates what should and not should be in the news. This assumes the fact that reporters initiate stories of their own and that editors rarely meet with publishers. Most of the journalists rarely know who even sits in the board of directors of the institutions they work for and so the political economy perspective is easily dismissed (Daniel, 1997, p.10). Political economy scholars focus on conservative, system-maintaining character of news but there are other possibilities. One of them is the exact opposite that the press is characterized as adversarial, system attacking, denigrating, government toppling and crime promoting. Perhaps the most complex question of “what to explain” concerns whether one should find distressing, and try to explain, the deviation of media from “fair” and “objective” or, instead, should find disturbing and try to understand how it is that “fair”, ”objective” reporting(Daniel, 1997, p.11). Defender of the free market argues that freedom in the free market is a necessary condition for democracy to flourish. The role of journalism is to supply the link between the market and democracy. A free market brings with it a free press that supplies the diversity of opinion and access to information that a citizenry requires in order to act in a democratic responsible manner. The liberal economic position has been prominent in recent debates concerning the first amendment in United States and the recent deregulation of the media in Europe. The market inhibits the dissemination of information and diverse opinions required of a democratic society and this creates tension between the internal goals of journalism and the market context in which it operates (Andrew, 1992, p.12). According to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights ‘Freedom of speech should only be restricted where there is a pressing social need to do so for the advancement of some other important objective’. Such condition may be subject to conditions prescribed by law and is necessary in a ‘democratic society in the interests of national security’ (COE, 2012). In the United Kingdom, journalists are faced with the task of expanding in shrinking confines of defensible legal space have also contend with the bewildering variety of complementary and competing extra legal constraints. A particular development is the availability of interlocutory injunction for breach of confidence against specific publishers of information, backed up by the use of the law of contempt against any other publisher. Domestic French law has experienced no difficulties in creating this network in suppression and the only mechanism for change is likely to be in response to decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (Harcup, 2009; Reese, 1990). COE(2012) continue to state that in a free society, official secrets legislation should protect information that, were it to become widely available, would jeopardize the security of the nation. it should not embrace information that can be made public without damaging the national interest, whether or not the publication of that information embarrasses the Government of the day. The problem for media in a democracy less than liberal with information is to keep the national demarcation lines in focus since by demarcation the task of distinguishing necessary from expedient secrecy is frequently dependent on official information and convenient leaks. According to Dunlevy (1998) some of the judiciary proposes that a balance should be struck between the interest of the national security and the freedom of the press. The metaphor of the balance gives an air of objectivity to the irreducibly subjective activity of evaluating ‘public interest’. It is true that ‘weighing’ is ‘altogether commonly used by legal writers which trades on the connotation of the exact and objective measurement scales. Fortunately the judicial attitudes are not always homogenous in this area. Hacket (1994) continues to argue that even the current survey shows that the press is held in low esteem by the public for offending in many ways. Although in itself tells us nothing on the ethical quality of the press, it does suggest that a start should be made on quality control by contemplating the introduction of code of conduct which would prohibit this journalistic malpractices and provide that journalists be accountable for their actions. In some parts of the world, a journalist’s indiscretion could put in danger the life of the subject of a news story. If harms can be measured on a scale of distress, some cases of invasion of privacy may cause more harm than in cases of health. The idea that journalists should be licensed to practice with the license being removed for violation of a serious code of conduct is surely undemocratic solution to the problem of media malpractice. The basis of an ethical code of conduct is not just a matter of rules to be followed. It is more to do with principals concerning the wrongs and rights, principles which have more reasoned theoretical basis and which apply impartially and objectively. The ultimate reason to have a code of conduct is to ensure quality so as return the honor of journalism (Tumber & Prentoulis, 2003). And so we conclude by saying, that to solve the inherent controversy of “objectivity”, it is suggested that Journalists need to be freed and encouraged to develop expertise and to use it to sort through competing claims, identify and explain the underlying assumptions of those claims, and make judgments about what readers and viewers need to know to understand what is happening. In short, journalists need to be more willing to judge factual disputes Journalists must acknowledge, humbly and publicly, that what they do is far more subjective and far less detached than the aura of “objectivity” implies. This will not end the charges of bias, but will allow journalists to defend what they do from a more realistic, less hypocritical position (Brent, 2003). References Andrew Besley (1992). Ethical issues on Journalism, Illustrated Edition, Routledge Publishers. Belsey, A. & Chadwick, R. (1992) Ethical Issues in Journalism and the Media. London: Routledge. Brent Cunningham (2003). Rethinking objectivity, retrieved 3rd March 2013 from http://www.cjr.org/feature/rethinking_objectivity.php?page=all Calcutt, A. & Hammond, P. (2011) Journalism Studies: A critical introduction. London: Routledge Council of Europe (2012). Margin of Appreciation, retrieved 3rd March 2013 from http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/cooperation/lisbonnetwork/themis/echr/paper2_en.asp Daniel A. Berkowitz (1997). Social Meanings of News Illustrated Edition, SAGE Publishers. Dunlevy, M. (1998) Objectivity, in M. Breen (ed.) Journalism: Theory and Practice, pp. 119-138. Paddington, NSW: McLeay Press. Hackett, R. (1984) Decline of a Paradigm? Bias and Objectivity in News Media Studies, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, SAGE publication1(3): 229-59. Harcup, T. (2009) Journalism: Principles and Practice. London: Sage [chapters 5 & 6] Lambert M. Surhone, Mariam T. Tennoe, Susan F. Henssonow (2010). Objectivity (Journalism). VDM Publishers. Reese, S. D. (1990) The News Paradigm and the Ideology of Objectivity: a Socialist at the Wall Street Journal, in D. Berkowitz (1997) Social Meanings of News, pp.420-440. London: Sage Richard Collins, Cristina Murroni (1996). New Media, New Policies: Media and communications Strategy for the Future. Institute for public policy research. Tuchman, G. (1972) Objectivity as Strategic Ritual, in American Journal of Sociology, 77: 660-679 Tumber, H. &Prentoulis, M. (2003) Journalists under Fire: Subcultures, Objectivity and Emotional Literacy, in Thussu & Freedman: War and the Media: Reporting Conflict 24/7, pp. 215-230. London: Sage. Read More