Corporate media leaders at the Knight-Cronkite News lab have published a playbook for mass media journalists on how how to eschew objectivity in reporting because it is propagated by “White, educated, and fairly wealthy?” people.
“Increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality,” former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. wrote.
“They point out that the standard was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world,” he continued.
The “Beyond Objectivity” playbook argues that the practice of giving balanced coverage to issues championed by left-wing activists has “got to go.”
“They believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘bothsidesism’ in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects,” Downie Jr. insisted. “And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”
“Objectivity has got to go,” said Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle.
And Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor at the Associated Press argued, “It’s objective by whose standard? … That standard seems to be White, educated, and fairly wealthy.”
Downie Jr. also argued that “Journalists of color” and non-heterosexual journalists claim reporting objectively “negates their own identity, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”
The authors of the “playbook” did not cite any examples of objective reporting at corporate media outlets that would need to be curtailed.
This news and commentary by Gabriel Keane originally appeared on Valiant News.
