Last month, more than 1,200 New York Times contributors and 34,000 readers and media workers signed a open letter to the newspaper expressing concern about its coverage of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people.
Unsurprisingly, the Times denied all accusations of bias, saying its coverage “strives to explore, interrogate, and reflect on the experiences, ideas, and debates in society.” But those who believe the Times’ coverage of trans lives is not only biased but also downright dangerous point to legal motions in several US states in support of anti-trans legislation that cite the newspaper’s reports and articles. in its editorial and opinion pages.
The dangers posed by Times coverage are horrifying and terrifyingly predictable. They are the inescapable result of enshrining “objectivity” as a guiding principle in the American media, creating an environment in which telling “all sides” of the story can hurt the very people whose stories we seek to tell.
To understand how we got here, it helps to go back in time to unravel the origins of the idea that still guides not only the American media but American culture in general. Before the 19th century, objectivity was defined by its root, “object.” If it was in the outside world, something that could be touched, smelled, or seen by more than one person was automatically considered objective, something as real as it was tangible.
The scientific revolution and the invention of machines like the camera, X-ray, and voice recorder in the 19th century added another layer to this notion. In its wake, objectivity had more to do with our ability to let go of personal feelings, attitudes, and biases when perceiving things, including people, events, and ideas.
But the original meaning of the concept persisted in this most recent iteration, as machines, objects, performed detachment better than humans. The camera, for example, and its light capture and convergence processes were praised for eliminating the error and skew that plagued human representations of any scene. The same was believed for the voice recorder, X-rays and many subsequent inventions until today, when algorithms are considered more accurate and neutral than humans.
Then as now, we value objectivity primarily as a way to overcome our emotions, our flaws, our humanity. Out of this fundamental fear of ourselves and our fallibility was born the idea of journalistic objectivity, which encourages a claim to precision and “machine-like” detachment in journalists. In practice, this often takes the form of fairness, “telling all sides” of a story and avoiding too close relationships with sources.
At first glance, these principles seem to make sense, as they allow readers to make their own judgments after digesting all the relevant facts. However, these “objective” principles often mask deeply subjective trade-offs.
In a world of limited resources and attention spans, editors and journalists still have to make decisions about what stories to cover, who to interview, what questions to ask, how to frame the events they report on, what information and characters are amplified. and what are minimized. And in the US, where newsrooms are still predominantly whitestories seen as “objective” are often those geared toward white sensibilities.
That’s why, in general, minorities, whether defined by race, sexual orientation, or gender identity, are rarely treated with the same depth, nuance, or care as the majority. Instead, in our quest for objectivity, the media too often resorts to tropes expected by a white, cisgender, and straight audience: poor people of color, angry blacks, sexually confused teens, indigenous people living in harmony with nature. , etc. More than we like to admit, objectivity translates into laziness, both on the part of the media and their audience.
The many failures of objectivity begin to seem inevitable the more the history of the concept unravels. The story I told earlier of its evolution linked to the invention of certain machines is only half of its real story, which is also related to prejudice and fear, of ourselves and of others.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, who was the first to formulate objectivity and subjectivity in opposition to each other, also used these ideas to advocate a racial hierarchy that placed the “lazy, soft, and trivial Negro” at the bottom. .
In recent years, it has been revealed that the camera, hailed for its ability to perfectly reproduce reality, is as subjective as the mind that operates it.
“A photograph is not necessarily a lie,” wrote critic John Berger, “but neither is it the truth. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression.” This impression depends on the subject’s relationship with the photographer and with that moment in time. It depends on the light, the edition and the composition. It depends on what is included and what is left out of the frame, never to be seen.
Consider, for example, the photographs from National Geographic. In 2018, the magazine asked scholar John Edwin Mason to dive into its 130 years of coverage and investigate his record of racial representation. Mason found that the “magazine’s photography, like the articles, did not simply emphasize difference, but… ranked difference” with Westerners and whites at the top.
This kind of reckoning is as rare as it is necessary in our media institutions, especially in the US. Journalism have discovered that throughout Europe, the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia, “objectivity” is not a main feature of the media institutions, which means that America’s obsession with it is as culturally specific as the Super Bowl or 4th of July celebrations. It also means that if objectivity is no longer useful, or if its dangers outweigh its usefulness, we can and should look elsewhere for alternatives to take its place.
Today, most media outlets in Europe and the Global South have embraced a “contextual”, “analytical” or “interpretive” style of journalism, which asks journalists to express their nuanced but professionally based opinions about what is exactly the truth and why.
American journalist Wesley Lowery’s idea of “moral clarity” also holds promise, requiring that sources offering misinformation or biased opinions be clearly labeled as such and that media leaders think deeply about who is being offered the platform of an opinion piece or editorial, which does not have the railing tracking a reporter. up questions.
Moral clarity also means that media institutions hire and empower journalists from the communities they seek to cover rather than simply believing that an “objective” reporter can tell the story of each and every community.
Moral clarity, in other words, holds that truth is not the same as objectivity, which can go unnoticed as ahistorical, apolitical, and context-agnostic. Faced with the truth, objectivity is the easy way out, the trapdoor into which whiteness and fear have tended us to fall. It is the present stripped of the past, a nation asleep in its own history and a newspaper that believes its coverage can “explore, interrogate and reflect” without shaping the very reality it covers.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
