Based on Lippmann (1963) the Public Relations came out in the inter-war period was one attempt to manage a new and unpredictable public by engineering or manufacturing consent. The character of journal objectivity has always been double faced, combining the genuine extension of public knowledge and informing a public debate. However, it has the means to narrow a debate with acceptable parameters. Few would want to celebrate objective journalism uncritically, but equally, few would wish simply to write off journalism’s potential for sustaining the public sphere and informing democratic decision-making.
According to Allan (1997) more than a decade ago that the end of objectivity and impartiality as the guiding principles of an ethic of public service may soon be insight and there was a lot of evidence that this was correct. In the 1990s, a number of foreign journalists reject the idea of objectivity. The BBC’s Martin Bell rejected the dispassionate practices of the past and maintained that he was ‘no longer sure what “objective” means. Objectivity meant having to stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor (Bell, 1998). Another famous reporter Christiane Amanpour from CNN said that in certain situations, the classic definition of objectivity can mean neutrality, and neutrality can mean you are an accomplice to all sorts of evil (Ricchiardi, 1996).
Objectivity means based on facts or evidence, not feelings or opinion. Objectivity requires evidence and verification. It is more than just attempting to be neutral (Sambrook, 2004). There is an objective standard of truth in the news. In the real world, news is the product of conscious and unconscious choices made by editors and producers, reflecting all sorts of biases and pressures. News values provide the criteria in the routine practices of journalism which enable journalists, editors and newsmen to decide routinely and regularly which stories are worthy and which are not, which stories are major lead stories and which are relatively insignificant, which stories to run and which to drop. People who were against of objective journalism argue that pure objectivity is unobtainable and that the notion of objectivity is, at best, a shield devised by corporate America to insure a sanitized version of the truth, and at worst, an ideological weapon used to maintain the status (Streckfuss, 1990). However, objective journalism as technique avoids this philosophical debate and concentrates on the means and values of the approach. It is the practices employed to achieve this unobtainable goal which become most important (Streckfuss, 1990). Objective journalism as a technique is based both on the original meaning (Lippmann, 1963) and the more recent practice of this form of studying each of these aspects is essential to understanding the values and means of this form of journalism. Furthermore, it was believed that objective journalism would benefit the public by providing simple and unbiased presentations of facts from which people could formulate their own conclusions. Moreover, the basic belief of objective journalism is to extract reporter biases from journalism, to present factual information in order to best inform the public, to protect the public from duplicitous or biased journalism, to eschew emotional or slanted reporting and to raise the credibility of the profession of news reporting (Streckfuss, 1990).
These days it is fashionable to question whether there is any such thing as 'truth'. Whether facts actually prove anything; whether objectivity is worth striving for (Sambrook, 2004). Sambrook (2004) believes that accurate, objective news and information, which all sides can trust, provides a foundation stone of rational debate in a world that is too easily dominated by intolerance and hatred. If your process is scientific objective, then overall, the news should in general be objective. Weirdly, sports journalism is often the most objective, since the result of a game is usually a sequence of numbers and is final. Although, the difference here comes in which teams or players to highlight. For example, certain teams in certain sports get special treatment, both from media and ranked officials.
There is a very big prejudice around journalist till nowadays if they are objective and if they are saying the real truth especially when journalists try to cover a war. For example, according to a Guardian’s article (O’Loughlin, 2009), ‘’plans to allow journalists into were aborted yesterday after Israel's military said it was too dangerous to keep staff at the Erez passenger terminal to allow people to cross into the besieged territory. Israel argues that excluding the international media from Gaza is helpful because foreign journalists are unethical and biased in their reporting. Foreign journalists are "unprofessional" and take "questionable reports at face value without checking", said Danny Seaman, who heads Israel's government press office, which vets and issues permits to foreign correspondents. Seaman said it was not Israel's responsibility to give foreign media access to Gaza. "They should have been there in the first place," before Israel began restricting access on 6 November, said Seaman. "We are not going to endanger the lives of our people just to let journalists in." Israel began restricting media access to Gaza after the six-month ceasefire with Hamas began unravelling on 4 November. But a high court challenge by the Foreign Press Association resulted in a compromise in which eight members of the media were to be allowed in when the Erez crossing was opened for humanitarian reasons. During the case the military had told the court it was too dangerous to allow journalists in. Under the agreed arrangement, aborted yesterday, the FPA was allowed to select six journalists by lottery and submit the names to Israel for vetting. Israel selected the other two journalists. In this first pool it chose people from NBC and Fox news, which is pro-Israel’’.
Situations like that are especially difficult because you have different sources telling you different things and it comes down to compare which has more truth, if even incomplete. As mentioned above, there will be lots of opinions whether journalism is objective or not. Moreover, based on the above journalism history a lot of argues had made and change the way journalist are now covering news and events but still not many people can trust them anymore, not even nations. What if what we want is not objective journalism at all? News can not exist without definition, and as soon as it is defined it becomes partial. Without definition it has no social context. Without social context it means nothing.
References and Bibliography
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Allan, S. (1997) News and the Public Sphere: Towards a History of Objectivity and Impartiality, London: Routledge.
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Bell, M. (1998) The Journalism of Attachment, Mathew Kieran, Media Ethics, London: Routledge.
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Curran, J. and J. Seaton (2003) Power Without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting and New Media in Britain, 6th Edition.
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Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. , Cambridge
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Lichtenberg, J. (1991) In Defense of Objectivity,
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Meda Chesney-lind And Lisa Pasko. (2003) The Female offender: Girls, Women and Crime 2nd edition, (Sage publications).
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Streckfuss R. (1990), Objectivity in Journalism: A Search and a Reassessment, Journalism Quarterly.
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Walter Lippmann, (1963), Two Revolutions in the American Press in The Essential Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, and James Lare, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Internet links
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Richard Sambrook (2004), Holding on to Objectivity,
Available at:
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Toni O’Loughlin (2009), Deal to admit journalists aborted, The Guardian
Available at:
- http://books.google.co.uk/books
