Objectivity in Professional Journalism - Literature review Example

Objectivity in Professional Journalism Introduction Journalism is gathering, processing, and dissemination of information and news to the public. The media used by the journalists varies and they include published contents through the magazines and newspaper (print), radio and television (broadcast), and the one that is used lately is the digital version of the media (website). The status and the role of the journalism alongside other mass media have passed through numerous changes in the past decades with the coming of news being published over the internet and the digital technology platform. Global journalism is a concept that is new. It can thus be described as a new trend that goes far beyond boundaries with regard to foreign journalism. It is basically based on facts and the reality of the global outlook and the possibility of the precipitation of development in global citizenship. Global journalism consist of diverse interest such as global crisis that relates to reporting (Cottle, 2009), conflict (Seibi, 2002), the global media and culture (Van Ginnekeen, 2005; Volkmer, 1999), analysis and Mapping of journalism culture that are in the world (Herbert, 2001). Even if one supports the concept of journalistic professionalism (Banning, 1999), or is against it Christians and Nordenstreng (2004). The reality is that studies relating to journalist are not coherent field of research that gives a divergent approach to methodology and theories in relation to journalism studies. Siebert, Schramn, and Petersen published a book on four theories in relation to journalism early in 1956. These theories are the ones that are mostly used in colleges to lecture journalism students (Sterling, 2009). The assumption of the four theory model is grounded in the fact that the entire mass media and journalism does give a reflection of the social reflection of a given country. According to Siebert and colleagues, the authoritarian school of thought is treated as the oldest journalism concept which existed between 16th and 17th century and was mostly used in Britain. To safeguard the authority, the function of the press was limited in some ways. The people behind authoritarian concept were Hegel, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Plato. Their reasoning was that people were juniors to the state. The key aim in the authoritarian concept of journalism is basically to support and help in the development of policies of the government. The news media function under the protection of the government and thus subjected to licensing, censorship, and permits of the government. The state also allowed for private ownership, of the media, but the journalist had to report according to the state policies. The theory of libertarian journalism was the second one and it was of the opinion that individuals are rational beings who are capable of substantiating truth from false. The assumption of this concept is that people are in a position to select the information deemed best to them manually from the media and that the government should refrain from interfering. The social responsibility theory is more of libertarian concept that is modified. This concept emphasises on the significance of conflict so as to enhance the public debate. Anybody who wishes to talk or express anything indeed does have a right to utilise the media. This concept is affected by the actions of the consumers, professional ethics and the opinion of the community. The fundamental interest and the privacy of the society should not be interfered with by the journalist at all costs. Even if the media is in the hands of private owners, the government too is free to create its own public service. The last theory postulated by Siebert and colleagues, was the communism school of thought which was based on the works of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx. This concept is of the assumption that issues such as individual rights and rationalism are indeed not feasible. Thus this model was to function as conveyor of the state policies. The news reports were agitators, propagandists, and supporters of the government systems and therefore were under the control of the communist party. Objectivity of professional journalism Objectivity of journalism is important journalistic professional principle. It can thus refer to factuality, fairness, non partisanship, and disinterestedness, but in most cases it entails all the above mentioned elements. Majority of TV stations and newspapers depends on news agencies for their resources and also on major global news agencies such as Associated Press, Reuters, among others. The urge for objectivity concept was first seen at the Press Associated editors who saw that partisanship will make them to narrow their perceived potential market. Their objective was for them to reach to all newspapers, and then let the people make decisions for themselves with relation to the story in the newspaper. A great deal of journalism legitimacy emanates from the fact that it can present pictures that are true and real (broadcasting). Nobody would have resorted to utilise journalism in a case where even the journalist themselves were to say that the news disseminated consisted of pictures that are not real and false. Truth and reality are concepts which cannot be separated from the objectivity concept. Thus should a person speak of journalism paradigm, then objectivity in dispersing/spreading news across the print (e.g. newspaper), and broadcasting (radio, television) is mandatory. In journalism itself, a number of schools of thought exists that have tried to functionalise the objectivity concept such as scientific journalism, mainstream journalism, precision journalism and new journalism. To make the concepts to operate, it is thus required that a person can either borrow other people’s idea or that a person thinks for herself or for himself. True professionalism in journalism stated in the late 1800s. The institute of higher learning (Missouri University) was the pioneer institute of higher learning to offer journalism as a course. The pioneer journalist trade union was founded in 1883 in England. During this period, journalism resembled to a large extent what Hindman termed mainstream journalism that is arguably used by the vast of journalists. Mainstream journalism is represented by norms that are professional and employs given strategies/approaches of construction and gathering of news. A journalist that employs the mainstream concept, thus keeps the distance from his or her subjects, seeks information from official places, presents the information in given ways, and tries at all times to remain objective (Hindman, 1998). The concept of positivist is binary, in that a person can either be subjective or objective. Being subjective can be said to be a situation where a person’s own assessments (values and attitudes) may impact knowledge. On the other hand being objective implies that a person is satisfied and content in presenting the information that is not influenced by his or her own assessment, e.g. facts. A fact is what a person can directly experience, that what other people will be capable or rather in position to understand precisely in the exact way. The values of true fact cannot be discussed. Therefore if a person is satisfied to talk facts in his or her broadcasting or through the print media, then the person can be said to be objective (Hackett and Zhao, 1998). Therefore everything that a journalist must and can write should be that of which one can observe directly and is factual. As a journalist, one must try as much as he/she can to put his/her opinion out of a given product and it only the reader who should be given the chance to give his/her opinion on the facts presented by the journalists. And as cited by Brown et al., (2011), journalist should report what has occurred (the real facts) and keep their opinions to themselves. The concept of objectivity presented by Westersthls’ (1983), tries to weigh concepts of relevance, presentation that is neutral, truth, and balance against the facts presented. He literally measured the degree of the objectivity of the covered news in eight different scenes. For each of the eight scenes, the balance was determined in a scale ranging from +20 to -70. Determining balance with regard to the coverage of news in this manner is thus reminiscent of the legacy of positivist objectivity. Attempts to operationalise objectivity concept are still going on, which is supported by Shaw and colleagues. Shaw noted that when a journalist is writing a given story, journalists always keep issues in their story on opposing sides, thinking that their story will be the one only to be seen by the public. The journalists normally do this since they seek to remain objective, or to be balanced and fair. This is the fact regardless of the journalists’ opinion that attaining objectivity is just not possible, and they claim that they can only try to be fair. But the fact is that objectivity and fairness go in handy, because what matters most is the information that is presented to the people, and assuring them that the news are balanced, accurate, and fair. (Shaw, et al., 1997). From the work of Shaw and his colleagues, it is evident that fairness and objectivity can be said to be synonymous. The interesting aspect here can be said to fairness which can therefore be graduated, where a person can be more or less fair in the way he or she preset s the news either via the print (newspaper, magazine), or via the broadcasting (television, radio). And due to unequivalence between one being objective and one being fair, a person also can thus be more or less objective. Shaw et al further stated that for a journalist to be fair, one need to be balanced and accurate in what he/she presents to the public either in the print media (the dailies) or on the television and radio (broadcasting). For a journalist to achieve this, one needs to be non-partisan of what is being presented to the public, and tries to be very accurate with the source of news that one is presenting, so that it can be easily retrieved for cases of confirmation and verification. In doing this then the objectivity of professional journalism will be observed and the public will build loyalty and trust in them. Other scholars have tried to save journalism from the problem of legitimacy with respect to objectivity concept. Holbert &Zubric (2000) argued that the main reason why journalism was faced with not less than three directions of which all of them were different during the 1990s, precisely rested with the issue of objectivity definition in operational means. Egalitarian was the first direction in public journalism under this direction, public journalism is not that interesting, because it does not try to generalise objectivity concept. New literary journalism was the second definition. It tries to sever ties with objectivity. It borrows its belief from the theoretical schools of contemporary science such as structuralism, postmodernism, relativism, and deconstructivism. The above contemporary science does have one thing in common, which is to oppose the paradigm of positivism objective. The positivists will also emphasise that people are capable to comprehend real world in terms that are considered value free, while the contemporary scientist are of the opinion that is not practical, since peoples’ perception of the world is masked and influenced with all kinds of convention, learned categories, and concepts. The most interesting thing here, thus, now is not what real world assembles, rather, that what people can say in relations to it (the world) with the aid of various signs that are different e.g. language. The Lippmannian elitist journalism is the third direction. According to him, citizens in general do not have the ability, inclination, or the time for them to try and inform themselves questions that are important. The society was seen to be too complex, stereotype power was too great, and the immediate environment of the man was too dominant. To Lippmann, the cure for this was only through the use of experts to distill evidence and offer facts (Petersen, 2003). These experts could be the journalist themselves or researchers, if these journalists could obtain specific knowledge about a given topic. According to Lippmann, the road to the desired knowledge went through professional specialisation and through scientific approaches. The reasoning behind this is that journalists borrow vast of their tools used in the field of journalism from scientific methodology. He thus stated that indeed if journalism is to achieve objectivity in its undertaking, then it must therefore utilise to a great extent the scientific methods in their work (Strenckenfuss, 1990). Meyer (1989), argued that a good solution is by pushing journalism as a profession to incorporate the use of science, emphasising both the powerful analysis of data gathering for verifying the truth. To Meyer the methods of science if used in journalism will makes journalism events to be measurable, objectified, and named. He did expressed his contentment that science world indeed welcomes journalism. He cited that the precision journalism means taking journalism as science, incorporating scientific objectivity in the whole process with respect to mass communication (Meyer, 1989). Ironically the objective of Meyer was not that much in getting or ascertaining applications with respect to computer, but rather to simply apply the methodology of social science to the journalistic activities (Cox, 2000). Hence it is debatable if really differences exist between computer assisted report and journalism of precision (DeFluer, 1997). Computer aide reporters themselves indeed say that they perform it quite differently as compared to other journalists who use online resources, spreadsheets, and database tools (Cox, 2000). Another aspect of Lippmann concept of bringing closer relationship between science and journalism exhibits itself in the new journalism studies. Civic journalists and Advocacy journalists criticise the concept of the objectivity as nonpartisanship, or neutrality basing their arguing on the ground that it does not fully give service to the public since it falls short of truth finding mission. They further reiterate that such an objective is nearly impractical to be applied practically. For instance in newspapers one has to decide on what the headline of the story will be the story to be in the frontpage, the sources to be cited among other things. Some of the media critics such as Herman and Chomsky (1988), presented the model of propaganda which they employed to show how the concept of objectivity always end up in favoring the government views and those of the corporations that are powerful. Cunningham (2012) noted that the concept of objectivity makes the news reporter to be lazy in their work. This is because it reduces the reporters as passive news recipients, instead of being aggressive in the analysis and the explanation of the news either through the print media or broadcasting. Is cases where the journalist is time bad and that one has is both versions of the story that is relatively good enough, and because he or she can not improve on the story to a deeper comprehension in relations to the facts because of the limited time that one has, then the story may end up not living up to its expectation. According to Cunningham the problem that lies with objectivity is that one is required to be neutral and yet one is investigating, that one should not engaged his or her own opinions to the story and yet you are expected to have an impact, to be fair in mind and yet you are expected to have an edge. Thus objectivity is not practical Lynch (2008) noted that news reporters in any way are not warriors of ideologies. They are just imperfect individuals who are tasked with doing a difficult work which is critical to the society. Despite the various attempts that are being made with regard to objectivity in professional journalism, it is not easy to achieve this since all the people do have their own opinions about a given phenomenon without one being partisan. Journalist to must be allowed to have their personal sense and ethics, and must also be responsible at all times whenever one is reporting news be it through the print or the broadcasting. Every journalist must thus be willing, and if accuracy and fairness is needed to air their differences with their colleagues, either in the newsroom or the in the executive suits. This will be important because the journalists’ differences should not be spilled to the public because the public must lose trust in them and this will definitely affect the news being reported to the public. The journalists also in their news coverage, has to ensure that the news are comprehensive and that there nothing important that is left out, and that all that is being presented is true. Conclusion Majority of journalism being practiced presently basically adopts the positivists’ style. In various occasions, attempts have been made to try and break journalism of its perceived paradigm of objectivity, and to set itself free from the thinking of positivist’s point of view, but this have not succeeded, only with the exception of the new journalism. Many contemporary journalism are still going on side by side with the daily thinking and more science work so as to build or establish close link to positivism. The big issue is not the concept of concept of positivist objective applied in journalism, but rather because a vast of journalism is unaware of the origin of objectivity concept and the problems that are associated with its traditional use. According to Schudson (1990), he stated that it is not easy to do away with positivism both in scientific work and journalism. The encouraging news however to the journalists is that a decision is yet to be arrive at in journalism because of the continual challenge for journalists to meet its own created demands for them to be objective while disseminating news be it in the print media (newspapers, magazines), or in broadcasting (television, radio), the objectivity has to be there so as to avoid being caught in an awkward position. However some scholars have also voiced their dissatisfaction with regard to the concept of objectivity in journalism, citing that in real world it is not practical to achieve objectivity since people have their own bias opinion about any given phenomenon, thus compelling the journalists to be nonpartisan and yet one is needed to be an investigative agent is thus next to impossibility. They are of the opinion that journalist should be allowed to have their opinions on the news because they will have more weight to it, and this will also make them to be more active rather than being passive reporters of news. References Banning, S. A (1999). ‘The professionalization of journalism.’ Journalism History Brent Cunninghams (2012). faculty page. Columbia. Journalism School Brown, F., Black, J., & Society of Professional Journalists (U.S.). (2011). Journalism ethics: A casebook of professional conduct for news media. Portland, Or: Marion Street Press. 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