To be objective

JOURNALISTS, particularly reporters, are often told at some time of their professional lives that they must be objective, balanced and be detached in their reporting. However, is that something necessarily good? As in, say, two people writing on a particular subject. The first, in pursuit of objectivity, writes with great detachment while the other an ardent proponent of the issue writes with great passion. Would one then say that the latter writer/reporter was not being objective at all, since he allowed himself to become too involved in what he was writing?

And, in any case, no matter how objective you want to be and how detached you might want your report to come out as, isn’t the choice of the topic that you have elected to investigate or write on often the result of a deliberate and subjective decision? So, it would be safe to say that everyone — journalists included — has their biases but it’s better at least if one is conscious of them. A subconscious bias is probably the worst thing especially for someone who wants to make a media career — imagine the collective bias of a newsroom in a major city newspaper which is more likely to be skewed towards coverage of middle-class urban issues.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Brent Cunningham touches on this very theme in his article, ‘Re-thinking Objectivity’. He starts off with a critique of the way most mainstream American journalists have handled the Bush administration post-Sept.11, often devouring its half-truths, conjectures and outlandish claims as the truth.

For instance, he writes, in a press conference on March 6, in which President Bush laid out his reasons for invading Iraq, “he mentioned Al Qaeda or the Sept. 11 attacks 14 in 52 minutes. No one challenged him on it, despite the fact that the CIA had questioned the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, and that there has never been solid evidence marshalled to support the idea that Iraq was involved in the attacks of 9/11.”

Cunningham used two other examples, including Mr Bush’s proposed $726 billion tax cut plan, to drive his point that emphasis on being objective (a debatable point in itself) was perhaps one reason why so many US reporters were not aggressively asking the questions that needed to be asked of the Bush White House. As he puts it, perhaps, this principle of objectivity was making “us passive recipients of news, rather than aggressive analyzers and explainers of it”.

He says that though there are probably as many definitions of objectivity as there are people, his favourite is one from Michael Bugeja, a journalism professor at Iowa State University. “Objectivity is seeing the world as it is, not how you wish it were.” He says, and one would have to agree with him, that in their efforts to be objective - to “get both sides of the story”, so to speak - reporters fall prey to the tendency of quoting too much from official sources.

The reason for this is obvious since official sources are generally accessible and willing to talk, especially since they see it as a good opportunity to give their spin on an issue. Cunningham says, quoting a media analyst Andrew Tyndall, that of the 414 stories on Iraq broadcast on American networks NBC, ABC and CBS from September 2002 to February this year, 380 originated at the White House, Pentagon or the State Department. And of the 574 stories about Iraq aired on these channels’ evening news broadcasts between September 12 (when Mr Bush addressed the UN) and March 7, only 12 dealt primarily with the potential aftermath. Hence, the end result is that readers or listeners get too much of the “official” truth and what they were hearing was being shaped/manipulated primarily by the US government.

Relating this to Pakistan’s case is not going to be that easy. First of all, here official sources are not all that amenable to talking to reporters, and it is very difficult to get information from the government which tends to generally release it at a time of its own choosing and for its own purpose. Those who read newspapers here might think that this is a ready excuse for lazy reporting or not doing enough, as they say in the press here, ‘legwork’. Whatever the case may be, the fact is that getting official information, on stories of a reporter’s own choosing, is very difficult. So if you have to be objective but also want to write a story on say, the effects of a tannery on Karachi’s shoreline, and no official source is willing to come on record what do you do?

Cunningham talks about this problem afflicting small-town America and describes the case of an award-winning reporter in a midwestern state who faced many difficulties from his editors when he filed stories without any official attribution. The reason was that he was writing on the local courts system, which had cases pending for over 20 years and no official was willing to come out on record.

Cunningham writes: “No official sources were speaking out about it, so he [the reporter] felt obliged to fill that void. Is that bias? Good reporters do it, or attempt to do it, all time... Journalists (and journalism) must acknowledge, humbly and publicly, that what we do is far more subjective and far less detached than the aura of objectivity implies. If we stop claiming to be mere objective observes, it will not end the charges of bias but will allow us to defend what we do from a more realistic, less hypocritical position. Secondly, we need to free (and encourage) reporters to develop expertise and to use it to sort through competing claims, identify and explain the underlying assumptions of those claims, and make judgments about what readers and viewers need to know to understand what is happening.” — OMAR R. QURAISHI

(email: omarq@cyber.net.pk)