In a Consortium News rejoinder (4/30/09) to how “mainstream U.S. news media often laments the decline of objective journalism, pointing disapprovingly at the more subjective news that comes from the Internet or from ideological programming,” Robert Parry writes that
one could argue that the U.S. mainstream press has inflicted the severest damage to the concept of objective journalism by routinely ignoring those principles, which demand that a reporter set aside personal prejudices (as best one can) and approach each story with a common standard of fairness.
The truth is that powerful mainstream news organizations have their own sacred cows and tend to hire journalists who intuitively take into account whose ox might get gored while doing a story. In other words, mainstream (or centrist) journalism has its own biases though they may be less noticeable because they often reflect the prevailing view of the national Establishment.
Parry looks to “double standards” in corporate reportage on Nicaraguan Contras in the ’80s and the 2005 “assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri” to make clear that “how that translates into daily coverage is that an American news outlet often will demand a much lower threshold of evidence about serious accusations against a perceived U.S. enemy than an ally.” Anyway, as a longtime FAIR associate once noted on the age-old debate over the merits of journalistic objectivity: “Passive acceptance of murderous priorities in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy.”
Unfortunately, this problem isn’t limited to big corporate news. I live in a rural community with two competing weekly papers.
A friend of mine is a stringer for one of them and she spoke of an assignment she had to write about a local airport. She actually said, “I don’t feel very confident about this because I don’t have an opinion either way on it.”
I said to her, “That’s good.”
“No it’s not,” she said.
“If you have no opinion about it then you will be more objective in your article.”
“Whatever.”
Did I mention that this woman is a HUGE fan of Fox News?
What hope does the next generation of journalists have if the examples they see in “professional” journalism don’t subscribe to the basic tenets of objective reporting?