National Post (National Edition)
SUBJECTIVE JOURNALISM.
THE RISE OF A ‘NEW JOURNALISM’ THREATENS FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, WHICH BELONGS TO THE OWNERS
Throughout North America, the threats to freedom of the press and free speech seem to be expanding. The attacks come from all angles — from government, from technology, from within journalism, from the executives and owners of news organizations, from the left and from the right — but especially from the left, where the core principles of freedom of the press are under constant assault.
On June 1, for example, during a House of Commons Finance Committee meeting, MP Peter Julian, the New Democrats’ House leader, offhandedly suggested that perhaps newspapers and other media that receive government subsidies should be compelled to “show fair balance” in their journalism.
“It’s ironic,” said Julian, “that the National Post and the Toronto Sun, these rightwing sources of so-called information, are also heavily subsidized by Canadian taxpayers because advertisers can write off the kinds of advertising they do in those newspapers.”
Julian continued, questioning a witness from the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting: “What do you think is the best path moving forward to stabilize and ensure in the long term that we have a diversity of voices in the Canadian media, not just right-wing voices, and also to stop this idea that it’s always the taxpayer who has to pick up the tab for these rightwing sources and there isn’t a journalistic obligation for them to show fair balance?”
The witness never got a chance to answer that loaded question, which essentially attempted to open the door to the federal government using its subsidies as a lever to promote certain content and viewpoints in media that receive government funding.
Let us not pretend such ideas only rattle through the deeper corridors on the left wings of political power. Side attacks by lesser politicians on press freedom are a small brush fire on the fringes of a revolutionary wildfire sweeping Canada and the United States. “There is a spirit of ferocious intellectual intolerance sweeping the country and much of the journalistic establishment with it,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote recently about the situation in the U.S. “Contrary opinions aren’t just wrong but unworthy of discussion. The range of political views deemed morally unfit for publication seems to grow ever wider.”
Stephens was responding to the ongoing takeover of journalism by ideas that should be anathema to people in a society that cherishes free speech and freedom of the press. Internal newsroom clashes have rattled the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and, according to one report, at least half a dozen other U.S. newspapers. Here at the National Post internal reaction to Rex Murphy’s piece on whether Canada is or is not a racist country has prompted similar discussions.
The specific motivations for each of these journalistic revolts differ, although each was triggered by stories and commentary related to the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. The specific content of these disputes, however, is secondary to the underlying crisis burning through the media and journalism. What is the role of newspapers, broadcasters and other media — of journalism itself — in the context of a changing technological environment and broader political upheaval?
Shifts in many underlying ideological and technological plates are causing this upheaval in journalism, but two changes stand out.
The first is the changing concept of the role of the media regarding freedom of the press. The important 1956 book on journalism theory — Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do — outlined the libertarian version that, to a large degree, still prevails. Newspapers and other media are part of a great ideological competition that flourishes under a press that is free of government. Competition, both between privately owned newspapers and within each newspaper, became the standard in a free society. Biases and conflict existed, but as part of the normal course of a liberal and open exchange of ideas, analyses and facts.
The competitive market theory included a secondary element: objective journalism. Under this ideal of objectivity, “newspaper reporters thought that their job required an attitude of aloofness. They became spectators rather than participants in the controversies of the day.” The news pages of the paper provided factual grist that clearly demarcated editorial and op-ed pages milled into arguments about policies, values and the controversies of the day.
The objective journalism ideal was never attained, of course. Ideals seldom are. All writers and editors have perspectives and opinions — biases, if you wish — that shape their work. But the ideal served as an anchor that was at least consistent with the high principles of press freedom.
In Four Theories of the Press, the libertarian model and journalistic objectivity were categorically dismissed and replaced with a new idea. “Pure libertarian theory is obsolescent,” wrote one of the co-authors, “as the press as a whole has in fact recognized. Taking its place is an emerging (social responsibility) theory,” which puts increasing emphasis on the responsibility of the press to larger societal values.
One of the book’s authors, journalism Prof. Theodore Peterson, outlined the social responsibility option: “To the extent that the press does not assume its responsibilities, some other agency must see that the essential functions of mass communications are carried out.” Peterson saw government as the “other agency.”
In effect, the social responsibility theory became the authoritarianism lite theory.
So when Peter Julian muses about government forcing media outlets to show “fair balance” and responsibility, he is not breaking new ground. Four Theories of the Press worked it as far back as 1956. In this country, Ottawa’s Davey commission on the media, appointed in 1969, proposed a “Press Ownership Review Board” that would issue licences and guidelines and provide direct funding for newspapers and publications, thus creating a CBClike
structure of subsidies and government interference “to supplement the privately owned media” that supposedly were a menace to a democratic society.
Another recommendation for more state intervention came via the 1981 Kent Royal Commission on Newspapers, which declared: “Freedom of the press is not a property right of owners. It is a right of the people. It is part of their right to free expression, inseparable from their right to inform themselves.” The Kent commission called on Ottawa to take away the rights of owners and restructure the industry.
Most of these government attacks on press freedom faded, and with good reason. The rock-solid core of press freedom rests in private ownership of the press in all its modern forms — all print media, from the largest chain to the smallest flyer, from radio and TV to cable channels, websites and blogs.
But two forces are now out to undermine the model. The tech revolution has prompted new calls for state intervention, even from the owners and managers of other private businesses, who should know better but seem cowed by the current tsunami of activism.
Also on the rise is a new theory of journalism not envisioned by the Four Theories of the Press in the 1950s — an offshoot of the social responsibility theory: subjective journalism.
In this new model, journalists become the centre of the story. Two University of British Columbia journalism professors, Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young, outlined this “new approach to journalism” in a recent Toronto Star commentary. “Instead of business as usual, journalists need to set aside their long love affair with objectivity and learn to locate themselves in terms of their social histories, relations and obligations. Journalists need to recognize that what they think happened is deeply related to who they are and where they’re coming from in broad and specific senses.”
Callison and Young explore this theme of activist journalism at excruciating length in their new book, Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities. Instead of calling in the state to reshape journalism and the media, they call on journalists to reshape themselves. In Reckoning, they explore in thick postmodernist prose how the journalism of the past bears responsibility for the racism, inequality and sexism they say is entrenched in our societies, our psyches and our newsrooms.
The two profs’ model for the new activist journalism is Desmond Cole, a former Toronto Star columnist who, while covering a meeting of the Toronto Police Services Board, decided to intervene in the meeting and raise objections — certainly a no-no under objective journalism rules, but also taboo in the eyes of Toronto Star management. Cole lost his job, but Young and Callison defend his activism as a manifestation of the new journalism based on the individual journalists “situated knowledge as a form of expertise, particularly for journalists who are addressing issues related to gender, race and colonialism.”
Gone are aloofness and objectivity. The purpose of his new journalism is “to reveal, even if temporarily, the constructedness inherent in everyday life at the micro and macro level in an effort to understand the processes of profound change ongoing in cultures around the world, revealing sociohistorical contexts and connections.”
Whatever that means, it is at the heart of the new approach to journalism. Instead of objective journalism, we have a new model: an attempt by journalists to take over newsroom control from owners.
It is hard to know which is the greater danger to freedom of the press: subjective journalism or the looming expansion of the role of government in the media. The question is whether media owners can ward off the new journalism as effectively as they have more or less successfully — until now, at least — kept the government out of the newsrooms of the nation.
WRITERS AND EDITORS HAVE PERSPECTIVES AND OPINIONS ... THAT SHAPE THEIR WORK.