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Abstract
One of the inchoate yet defining features of journalism in the twenty-first century has been the profession's unannounced but nonetheless consequential repudiation of the time-honored journalistic ethos of “objectivity.” In this paper, I argue that the gradual renunciation of the ideals of objectivity in contemporary journalistic practice, especially in the United States which birthed the concept, is both a return to journalism's roots and a back-handed, if profit-inspired, embrace of certain hallmarks of “alternative journalism,” which emerged as a counterfoil to nineteenth-century notions of “objective journalism.” I demonstrate my thesis by historicizing “objective journalism” and linking its emergence to multiple impulses: industrial capitalism's desire to capture as many eyeballs to consumer goods as possible using the instrumentality of the mass media; the seduction of nineteenth-century positivism, which conduced to the uncritical valorization of epistemic precision, measurability, the “scientific method,” detachment, and other manifestations of naïve empiricism; and the turn-of-of-century delinking of political parties from newspaper business. I also argue that the progressive abandonment of the tenets of “objective journalism” by the legacy media is an artful hegemonic containment of alternative journalism's age-old ideals and singularities. This, I point out, is actuated by the imperatives of survival in an increasingly uncertain and fragmented media market, made even more so by the unexampled discursive democracy and diversity that the Internet has enabled, which has contributed to the flourishing of citizen and alternative journalism.
Notes
1. See, for instance, David L. Altheide, Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1976); Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content (New York: Longman, 1991).
2. See, for example, Michael Graham, “Election 2008: Objective Journalism the Loser,” The Boston Herald, last modified October 28, 2008, http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/letters/view.bg?articleid=1128260&format=text.
3. Michael Ryan, “Journalistic Ethics, Objectivity, Existential Journalism, Standpoint Epistemology, and Public Journalism,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 6, no. 1 (2001), 6.
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7. Schudson, “The Objectivity Norm.”
8. Schudson, “The Objectivity Norm.”, 155.
9. The Virginia Free Press, for instance, wrote on its front page: “It is stated in the New York papers that CHARLES DICKENS, decidedly the most popular author of the day, intends visiting the United States during the month of January next,” See Virginia Free Press [Charlestown, WV], col. A, November 4, 1841 (Issue 41).
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15. Porwancher, “Objectivity's Prophet.”
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29. Atton, “Towards a Cultural Study.”
30. See John D. Downing, Radical Media: The Political Experience of Alternative Communication (Boston: South End Press, 1984).
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38. Campbell, Information Age Journalism.
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44. Downing, Radical Media.
45. Atton, Alternative Media.
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47. Atton, Alternative Media.
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50. Haas, “Alternative Media,” 116.
51. Atton, Alternative Media, 154.
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61. Atton, Alternative Media, 11.
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63. Downing, Radical Media.
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