Objectivity and narrative in law and journalism
Objectivity is a key concept in the professional armory of both lawyers and journalists. But it is one that is also problematised in both professions.
Richard A. Posner (1990:7) has identified three types of objectivity in law.
- First we have the most common - ontological – understanding: objectivity as producing a direct correspondence to an external reality.
- Secondly, we have the scientific or experimental view of objectivity, which relies on the evidence of independently, replicable results.
- The third type of objectivity Posner calls, “conversational objectivity”.
In this third type of objectivity a court is persuaded that something is so. It is objectivity in the sense of “merely reasonable - that is, as not wilful, not personal, not (narrowly) political, not utterly indeterminate though not determinate in the ontological or scientific sense, but as amenable to and accompanied by persuasive though not necessarily convincing explanation” (Posner 1990:7).
Posner points out that although the first two forms of objectivity underlie much common thinking about law the third form is by far the more common in courtrooms. He also notes that the consensus achieved in conversational objectivity is largely dependent on cultural convergence. It is a negotiation around values – shared or otherwise. It is contingent and ideological. As he bluntly puts it:
Legal thought cannot be made objective by being placed in correspondence with the 'real' world. It owes whatever objectivity it has to cultural uniformity rather than to metaphysical reality or methodological rigour. (1990:30).
Although journalists would like to lay claim to methodological rigour, on any detailed analysis they too come-up short in the objectivity stakes. Just as Posner argues that the law’s apparent objectivity is at least in part dependent on persuasive rhetorical tactics and cultural homogeneity, the media’s objectivity is no less performative or ideological.
Gaye Tuchman (1978) in her study Making News, highlights a set of negotiations around objectivity similar to those identified by Posner. She identifies three types of objectivity:
- scientific,
- political and
- professional.
She contends that because of the practical, deadline-driven nature of journalism, the scientific model is largely irrelevant to most media practice.
Like other forms of inquiry, such as philosophy and science, journalism also explores connections between “phenomena and knowing,” but Tuchman maintains, that unlike scientific experiments, “news procedures are neither contemplative nor geared toward determining essence. Nor are they able to predict and confirm axiomatic statements.” (Tuchman 1978:82)
Tuchman’s notion of political and professional objectivity could be aligned with Posner’s “conversational” objectivity. In an earlier study Tuchman (1972) has argued that objectivity is primarily a “strategic ritual” for journalists. She highlights the instrumental function of objective practices in the legitimation of professional identity, rather than any necessarily objective outcomes in journalism texts. In her fieldwork she found that journalists adopted a series of practices such as
- the attribution of ideas to sources and
- seemingly even-handed attention to both sides of an argument
so that their stories take on a knowing veneer of objective reporting. This has the political advantage of protecting them from accusations of bias.
Hackett and Zhao (1998) in their book-length examination of objectivity and democracy, use the term “regime of objectivity” to make clear the particular discursive function that this ideal plays within journalistic practice and regulation.
In using the term we want to imply an unavoidable connection between journalism and relations of social and political power….As a way of producing that-which-can-be-regarded-as-valid accounts of the world, journalism’s objectivity regime is entrenched in news workers occupational routines and norms, the economic and other organisational imperatives of news media, and in broader cultural understandings and relations of social power. (Hackett and Zhao 1998:7)
Objectivity is enshrined, in both public imagination and in professional codes and regulations, as one of the defining professional norms of English language journalism (Hackett and Zhao 1998; Schudson 2001). However one striking feature of media studies literature is the impressive array of scholarship, across a variety of different disciplinary approaches – historical, sociological, political and cultural – that points to the complex social construction of news.
At one end of the spectrum we have Noam Chomsky’s political economy of news “manufacture” which sees mass media as an integrated part of hegemonic structures, which serve the needs of a political elite (Hermann & Chomsky 1988). At the other end of this spectrum we have cultural approaches such as Jack Lule’s, which emphasises that daily news items retell “eternal stories” through transparently “mythic structures”(Lule 2001).
As well as political economy and cultural studies critiques, a series of sociological studies (Schudson 1997) have shown the influence of such factors as routines (Tuchman 1997) professionalisation (Soloski 1989) and organisational and commercial imperatives (Hallin 2000) in news formation and production.
Indeed, as Stephen Reese has argued, the notion that journalism can be delivered “straight” without any interference is intrinsically ideological. Reese maintains that by “not appearing openly ideological” – through the deployment of standard conventions such as apparent separation of factual reporting from labelled commentary – “mainstream press reporting becomes all the more ideologically effective.” (Reese 1990:392)
Hackett and Zhao (1998:114-5) go even further by suggesting that the practical objectivity criteria of balance and of non-distortion are epistemologically incompatible. The notion of accuracy or non-distortion implies a positivist view of truth as accessible through singular “straight facts” while the idea of balance suggests a relativist Mannheimian view of knowledge discerned through balancing a series of partial truths.
Michael Schudson links the development of the objectivity regime in journalism to the need for a self-articulated narrative of professionalism, which arose as American journalism evolved in the early part of the twentieth century. He argues that the adoption of the objective ideal allowed journalists, as a newly emerging professional group, to “affiliate with the prestige of science, efficiency and progressive reform” (Schudson 2001:162).
This critical link to the ideologies of democracy, progress and science is what continues to give the objectivity regime its symbolic and functional power, within the profession and in public discourse, even when much of the literature disputes the possibility of objective practice.
However there are other ways to understand both communication and political participation. James Carey (1989:15) has argued for the potency of a ritual/symbolic view of communication over an objective, information transmission model; while Benedict Anderson (1983) has argued for a notion of modern nations as “imagined communities” rather than rational public systems.
Schudson (2002) has recently contrasted Habermas’ (1989) theory of the public sphere and its concentration on the development of a “free domain of reasoned public discourse” with that of Anderson’s “imagined communities,” which exist as “objects of orientation and affiliation.” While he credits the Habermasian model with a critical place in media studies, in the end he admits that perhaps Anderson’s framework is more productive for future research.
Anderson’s work potentially promotes a much more expansive reading of news than Habermas inspires, a recognition that news is not only raw material for rational public discourse but also the public consideration of particular images of self, community and nation. It implies that the study of news should be kin to other studies of the literary or artistic products of human imagination more than to studies in democratic theory. (Schudson 2002:484)
