Objectivity? Ha!

When I was in journalism school a long time ago, we were all liberals of a sort and knew we were because we talked a lot about it, at least among ourselves.

But along with courses in news writing, copy editing and typesetting (!!), we were required to take journalistic ethics, at the heart of which was the dictate to strive for objectivity in our work, to keep our political leanings out of the stories we chose to cover and how we covered them.

Like Joe Friday, it was supposed to be “just the facts, ma’am,” with the readers left to decide what they meant.

That experience comes back to mind because of the growing movement among journalists and within journalism schools to jettison objectivity as a goal in their work in favor of an ideological (“woke/social justice”) party line, with much of our mainstream media coverage now reflecting what could be called “narrative reporting.”

“Narrative reporting” is inherently biased because it begins with an ideological storyline and then seeks stories that can be made to fit into it.

Increasingly, the opinion pieces blend into the news “analysis” pieces, which then blend into and displace the reporting of hard news.

Along these lines, Mike Masterson not too long ago reported that the controversy over the hiring of 1619 Project lead writer Nikole Hannah-Jones produced claims among the North Carolina journalism faculty that the goal of objectivity (which Hannah-Jones makes no pretense of adhering to) was no longer desirable because it is impossible to achieve.

Journalists who make such a claim are, of course, using a form of second-grade logic, suggesting that a failure to achieve the impossible (completely objective reporting free of journalist bias) relieves us of the obligation to try; as if the inability of the police to solve every murder means they shouldn’t seek to solve any.

The real goal here isn’t so much to admit human fallibility as to discredit objectivity as a value and replace it with uninhibited bias (so long as that bias runs in the right, meaning leftward, direction).

It isn’t the inability to remain objective that really irks, but the manner in which the standard of objectivity threatens to limit the use of the media as an instrument of indoctrination.

The opposition to objectivity is thus based less on its alleged unattainability than the belief that it is in itself part of the problem; more specifically, the problem of white supremacy and patriarchy upon which American society has allegedly been built.

To even talk about media objectivity, of a commitment to actual facts and truth in reporting, is to betray the cause of social justice and thereby become complicit in upholding systems of oppression, of which even the First Amendment is a part (except when what the woke write is protected by it).

In short, the woke journalistic vanguard wouldn’t want objectivity as a value even if it was somehow attainable.

What this all means is that we are entering into a dangerous new conception of truth, defined not as that which is objective and based on facts and evidence, but a subjective conception based upon a predetermined, politically useful narrative.

It is no coincidence (to use a Leninist phrase) that the new, woke left has therefore embraced a view of truth similar to and every bit as totalitarian and malleable as the old left — in the USSR whatever served the interests of socialism was true, and since the party existed to serve the interests of socialism, anything the party said had to be true, even if it wasn’t.

There is, within this context, virtually no other way of explaining something like the embarrassing level of support on the left for The 1619 Project, which even its proponents inwardly know is full of falsehoods and distortions, but which can be used to bolster a new racial narrative that undermines the legitimacy of the nation’s founding as a first step toward undermining the legitimacy of the broader American nation.

The falsehoods would be definitive and the basis for rejection in the old world of objective truth, but are overlooked and rationalized or depicted as simply providing “a fresh perspective” (even if false) in the new, subjective one.

The subjective conception inherently rejects any facts or data that might complicate the approved narrative, in the same manner that Soviet media didn’t report Chernobyl or the pervasive alcoholism or the long consumer lines for bread and toilet paper.

It also explains why the American media was so eager to report demonstrably false stories about Border Patrol agents on horses “whipping” or “strapping” Haitian migrants, and continued to report them even after the false part entered the picture. Because the truth no longer matters; only the narrative. There was a time, not all that long ago, when the nation’s most prominent media figure, Dan Rather, provoked a major scandal by using falsified documents in a story about George W. Bush’s military service.

His news producer was unceremoniously and appropriately fired by CBS for journalistic negligence, and Rather later announced he’d be stepping down.

These days, in our brave new woke journalistic world, they would likely be given a big raise and a promotion.

Or maybe just an endowed chair in journalism at a prominent university.