The Twilight of Objectivity

How opinion journalism could change the face of the news.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, March 31, 2006, at 6:08 AM ET


CNN says it is just thrilled by the transformation of Lou Dobbs—formerly a
mild-mannered news anchor noted for his palsy-walsy interviews with
corporate CEOs—into a raving populist xenophobe. Ratings are up. It's like
watching one of those "makeover" shows that turn nerds into fops or
bathrooms into ballrooms. According to the New York Times, this demonstrates
"that what works in cable television news is not an objective analysis of
the day's events," but "a specific point of view on a sizzling-hot topic."
Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School, made the same point in
a recent New Yorker profile of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. Cable, Lemann wrote,
"is increasingly a medium of outsize, super-opinionated franchise
personalities."

The head of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, told the Times that Lou Dobbs' license
to emote is "sui generis" among CNN anchors, but that is obviously not true.
Consider Anderson Cooper, CNN's rising star. His career was made when he
exploded in self-righteous anger while interviewing Louisiana Sen. Mary
Landrieu after Hurricane Katrina and gave her an emotional tongue-lashing
over the inadequacy of the relief effort. Klein said Cooper has "that
magical something … a refreshing way of being the anti-anchor … getting
involved the way you might." In short, he's acting like a human being,
albeit a somewhat overwrought one. And now on CNN and elsewhere you can see
other anchors struggling to act like human beings, with varying degrees of
success.

Klein is a man who goes with the flow. Only five months before anointing
Cooper CNN's new messiah (nothing human is alien to Anderson Cooper; nothing
alien is human to Lou Dobbs), he killed CNN's long-running debate show
Crossfire, on the grounds that viewers wanted information and not opinions.
He said he agreed "wholeheartedly" with Jon Stewart's widely discussed and
uncharacteristically stuffy remark that Crossfire and similar shows were
"hurting America" with their occasionally raucous displays of emotional
commitment to a political point of view.


But that's just a personal gripe (I worked at Crossfire for six years),
easily resolved by a slavish apology. More important is that Klein is right
in sensing, on second thought, that objectivity is not a horse to bet the
network on. Or the newspaper, either. The newspaper industry is in the midst
of a psychic meltdown over the threat posed by the Internet. Internet panic
is a rolling contagion among the established media. It started with
newspapers, now it's spreading to magazines, and within a year book
publishers will be in one of their recurring solipsistic frenzies.

No one seriously doubts anymore that the Internet will fundamentally change
the news business. The uncertainty is whether it will only change the method
of delivering the product, or whether it will change the nature of the
product as well. Will people want, in any form—and will they pay for—a
collection of articles, written by professional journalists from a detached
and purportedly objective point of view? The television industry is panicky
as well. Will anyone sit through a half-hour newscast invented back when
everyone had to watch the same thing at the same time? Or are blogs and
podcasts the cutting edge of a new model for both print and video—more
personalized, more interactive, more opinionated, more communal, less
objective?

Objectivity—the faith professed by American journalism and by its critics—is
less an ideal than a conceit. It's not that all journalists are secretly
biased, or even that perfect objectivity is an admirable but unachievable
goal. In fact, most reporters work hard to be objective and the best come
very close. The trouble is that objectivity is a muddled concept. Many of
the world's most highly opinionated people believe with a passion that it is
wrong for reporters to have any opinions at all about what they cover. These
critics are people who could shed their own skins more easily than they
could shed their opinions. But they expect it of journalists. It can't be
done. Journalists who claim to have developed no opinions about what they
cover are either lying or deeply incurious and unreflective about the world
around them. In either case, they might be happier in another line of work.

Or perhaps objectivity is supposed to be a shimmering, unreachable
destination, but the journey itself is purifying, as you mentally pick up
your biases and put them aside, one-by-one. Is that the idea? It has a
pleasing, Buddhist flavor. But that's no substitute for sense. Nobody
believes in objectivity, if that means neutrality on any question about
which two people somewhere on the planet might disagree. May a reporter take
as a given that two plus two is four? Should a newspaper strive to be
open-minded about Osama Bin Laden? To reveal—to have!—no preference between
the United States and Iran? Is it permissible for a news story to take as a
given that the Holocaust not only happened, but was a bad thing—or is that
an expression of opinion that belongs on the op-ed page? Even those who
think objectivity can be turned on and off like a light switch don't want it
switched on all the time. But short of that, there is no objective answer to
when the switch needs to be on and when it can safely be turned off.

Would it be the end of the world if American newspapers abandoned the cult
of objectivity? In intellectual fields other than journalism, the notion of
an objective reality that words are capable of describing has been going
ever more deeply out of fashion for decades. Maybe it doesn't matter what
linguists think. But even within journalism, there are reassuring models of
what a post-objective press might look like.

Most of the world's newspapers, in fact, already make no pretense of
anything close to objectivity in the American sense. But readers of the good
ones (such as the Guardian or Financial Times of London, to name the most
obvious English-language examples) come away as well-informed as the readers
of any "objective" American newspaper. Another model, right here in America,
is the newsmagazine. Time long ago abandoned the extreme partisanship and
arch style of its founder, Henry Luce, but all the newsmags produce
outstanding journalism with little pretense to objectivity.

Opinion journalism can be more honest than objective-style journalism
because it doesn't have to hide its point of view. It doesn't have to follow
a trail of evidence or line of reasoning until one step before the
conclusion and then slam on the brakes for fear of falling into the gulch of
subjectivity. All observations are subjective. Writers freed of artificial
objectivity can try to determine the whole truth about their subject and
then tell it whole to the world. Their "objective" counterparts have to sort
their subjective observations into two arbitrary piles: truths that are
objective as well, and truths that are just an opinion. That second pile of
truths then gets tossed out, or perhaps put in quotes and attributed to
someone else. That is a common trick used by objective-style journalists in
order to tell their readers what they believe to be true without inciting
the wrath of the Objectivity cops.

Abandoning the pretense of objectivity does not mean abandoning the
journalist's most important obligation, which is factual accuracy. In fact,
the practice of opinion journalism brings additional ethical obligations.
These can be summarized in two words: intellectual honesty. Are you writing
or saying what you really think? Have you tested it against the available
counterarguments? Will you stand by an expressed principle in different
situations, when it leads to an unpleasing conclusion? Are you open to new
evidence or argument that might change your mind? Do you retain at least a
tiny, healthy sliver of a doubt about the argument you choose to make?

Much of today's opinion journalism, especially on TV, is not a great
advertisement for the notion that American journalism could be improved by
more opinion and less effort at objectivity. But that's because the
conditions under which much opinion journalism is practiced today make
honesty harder and doubt practically impossible. Like the mopey vicar in
Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall, who loses a cushy parish when struck
by a case of "Doubts," TV pundits need to radiate certainty for the sake of
their careers. As Lou Dobbs has demonstrated, this doesn't mean you can't
change your mind, as long as you are as certain in your opinion today as you
were of the opposite opinion a couple of days ago.

But if opinion journalism became the norm, rather than a somewhat
discredited exception to the norm, it might not be so often reduced to a
parody of itself. Unless, of course, I am completely wrong.