Objectivity, Democracy and Expert Culture
By J.p. Lawrence (Next Section/Previous Section/Convergence Menu)
There was an increase in democratic content within newspapers as access to the news moved from the elite to the lower classes. Newspapers like the New York Journal and the New York World changed their content to reflect story-based model that reflected the lives of the lower classes, especially immigrants.
Corresponding to this movement, however, was a desire to professionalize the act of making news. This movement, spearheaded by Joseph Pulitzer, was an explicitly anti-democratic movement. Journalists ought to be separated from the general public by dint of their ability to follow certain rules.
Pulitzer’s monetary grant to start a Columbia University journalism school represented journalism’s attempt to change itself from a lower-class to an elite profession, the way lawyers and doctors are. Pulitzer at this point, was infamous for his paper’s participation in the sensationalist yellow wars, but even he could realize the importance of a set of professional rules – an ethos and a guiding call.
This would lead to the idea of objectivity.
The idea of objectivity would serve to separate the journalist from the layman. It is the idea that a person’s statements about the world can be trusted, provided that they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community (7). According to Schudson, objectivity is not only a claim toward what kind of knowledge is reliable. It is also a moral philosophy, a declaration of what kind of thinking a person should engage in, a guide toward what groups a person should acknowledge as relevant audiences (8). It provides a solution to why the news should be trusted: because a trained professional (not a layman) was there to process the facts.
In other words, objectivity as a philosophy is geared toward the educated and the middle to upper class. There are two mechanisms that underwrite objectivity: the advanced education and the training needed to build an objective attitude. Each require professionalization to acquire. In this way, objectivity promotes reason, and it distrusts the masses and the market.
Schudson argues that objectivity as a concept evolved over the course of decades. Notably, he traces its emergence to a time of great distrust of democracy: the 1920s. Objectivity arose in the 1920s as a response to the crises of the democratic market society (158). It was an expert culture, and the journalist was an expert by dint of his training.
And experts are more likely to refer to experts like them instead of the masses. As stated by a number of observers, the tradition of objectivity has always favored official views, the result not of intentional bias but the consequence, intended or not, of social forms and processes (185).
Trends within journalism would lead toward and away from professionalism. The emergence of adversary culture against the Vietnam War signaled a return toward the populist journalism of the World, and Wolfe’s New Journalism called for a return toward the story-based model. These cultural changes swayed the medium to the point of equilibrium.
But a technological change may yet shift journalism toward populism, just as it did in the 1830s. This change is the new printing press: the computer screen, connected to the entire world. The technological shifts brought by the internet have been like an earthquake, shaking at the foundations of belief in authorship. The cultural changes have already begun, but the aftershocks are yet to fully begin.
Works Cited:
Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History ofAmerican Newspapers. New York: Basic, 1978. Print.