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Within the world of journalism, objectivity tends to be a celebrated pursuit.
Reporting the news is about presenting facts, along with some portion of the context in which those facts exist. That often means a presentation of narrative alongside other frames of reference, but unless the journalist is operating as an editorialist—someone who presents opinions about the news, rather than just presenting the news itself—the aim is generally to convey these things without added distortion.
It’s been posited that the concept of journalistic objectivity can only ever be a goal: the literal accomplishment of true objectivity being impossible, because even deciding what to report upon is a type of bias, and even the most templated, formal flavor of journalistic writing can be subconsciously slanted based on the opinions of the writer and the incentives by which they operate.
This debatable reality doesn’t, and arguably shouldn’t, keep journalistic entities from attempting to maintain as much objectivity as possible.
The prudent response to a small amount of bias seeping into one’s work isn’t to aim for a lot more bias, it’s to acknowledge that existing bias while attempting to ameliorate it whenever possible.
That said, it’s arguably also possible to take the pursuit of objectivity too far. Or to perhaps apply it so broadly that it accidentally leads to the dispersal of, and implied journalistic support of, more misinformation and mistruth, rather than less.
Daniel Okrent is an interesting character who, among other things, was the first public editor of The New York Times, the writer of several history and baseball books, and the inventor of Fantasy Baseball.
He also coined what came to be known as Okrent’s Law, when he said, in an interview, “The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true.”
This statement alludes to what’s sometimes called the “argument to moderation,” which fallaciously posits that the truth can be found in between two opposing positions—a concept that can often seem logical in the moment, but when analyzed more fully, shows itself to be nonsensical.
You might, for example, have two people arguing over the correct sum of two-plus-two. One person might say four, and another person might say six. The argument to moderation would say, okay, let’s agree that the sum of two-and-two is five, but in reality, of course, two-plus-two is four. That some people might argue otherwise doesn’t change this, or other, demonstrable facts.
At times, though, the journalistic attempt to fairly present “both sides” of a story can accidentally appear to propose a middle-ground answer as the truth.
A common example of this tendency is found in so-called “he said, she said” journalism, where journalists report on what opposing sides of a given debate have said, rather than on the truth of what was being debated.
“In ongoing confrontation, Person A says 2+2=4, while Person B says 2+2=6,” the headlines might read. It sounds silly when presented in this way, but a shocking amount of reporting, especially on hot-button issues, amounts to exactly this.
Reporting on demonstrable lies told by politicians without pointing out that they are demonstrable lies, then, is often the result of reporters trying to avoid the appearance of bias against the lying politician.
The truth is that the politician is lying, but calling them a liar outright might seem, to that politician’s supporters, like unfair bias. Thus, the reporter—or the entity that employs them—may temper their reporting by presenting “both sides” of an argument, even when there’s only one legitimate side involved.
Okrent’s Law posits that, at times, the news will seem to come down hard on one perspective or another, because, at times, one perspective or another is less informed, less factual, or less supported.
The truth can seem biased to people who don’t believe, or don’t understand, that truth.
There are also often incentives that encourage people to misunderstand or ignore facts when they’ll be socially rewarded by other members of their tribe to do so.
The science behind human-amplified climate change, for instance, is fairly well-supported at this point, and most of the controversy amongst people who are doing the research and understand the numbers is about the degree of amplification that’s taking place, not whether it’s occurring to begin with.
To vehement climate change-deniers, reporting upon these facts as facts can seem like bias: and in countries where human-amplified climate change has become a political issue, such reporting will often be perceived as political bias.
This perception of bias doesn’t change the underlying facts, but it’s understandable that journalists, and the entities for which they work, may try to temper that perception of bias by presenting less-factual or even false information as an opposing perspective in their reporting.
This is an important tendency to understand, because of what it means for how we process information internally, and for how it effects the information we receive from external sources.
Internally, we may succumb to similar incentives, attempting to temper seemingly one-sided information with a counterbalance of weaker information; which can then take on a veneer of validity, despite its otherwise obvious non-validity.
Externally, there’s a chance that the information we’re receiving, even from well-regarded, unbiased-as-possible sources, is being filtered through a false balance-creating lens.
As a consequence, we may perceive disagreement where, in fact, there is no real disagreement—at least amongst people who know what they’re talking about—and we may assume imbalance in entities that don’t attempt to temper well-supported declarative statements with counter-arguments, no matter how nonsensical those counterarguments might be.
Thus, some of the best reporting can seem biased, while some rebalanced-to-the-point-of-uselessness reporting may seem superior—according to the flawed metric of balance-at-all-costs.
It’s unclear how best to ameliorate the negative effects of this “view from nowhere” flavor of bias that emerges as a result of the well-meaning attempt to remove bias from journalism.
Becoming more biased in one direction or another further inflates the issues they’re hoping to diminish, while trying to become more neutral can incentivize the presentation of false-balance as news, in some cases leaving consumers of the news less informed than they would have otherwise been.
Individually, though, we can seek out well-supported and well-documented data, assess that data to the best of our ability—taking the opinions of informed people into account as we do so—while also acknowledging that our conclusions are based on our subjective experiences and inherently limited bodies of knowledge.
Enjoying Brain Lenses? You might also enjoy my news analysis podcast, Let’s Know Things.
There’s also a podcast version of Brain Lenses, available at brainlenses.com or wherever you get your podcasts.