Baron rises to the defense of objectivity in journalism

MARTY BARON, the former editor of the Washington Post and Boston Globe, came to Brandeis University last week and threw down the gauntlet to those who think objectivity in news coverage is an outmoded concept.

“I find myself in a diminishing minority and yet I have no reservations about being a dissenter,” Baron said in accepting a “distinguished fellow” award. “Not when I consider the subject so important and not when I see our profession moving headlong in what I consider a misguided and ultimately self-destructive direction.”

Baron took issue with a report issued in January by Leonard Downie, a former executive editor at the Washington Post, and Andrew Heyward, a former president of CBS News. The two former media executives, who are now professors at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, interviewed 75 news leaders and came away persuaded that objectivity is no longer relevant to the coverage of news.

Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press, told Downie and Heyward that she has not used the word objectivity since the early 1970s because she believes it reflects the world view of “white, educated, fairly wealthy guys.” 

The report quoted Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief of ProPublica, the national investigative journalism nonprofit, as saying: “Objectivity is not even possible. I don’t even know what it means.” 

Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, said attitudes in his newsroom have shifted. “The consensus among younger journalists is that we got it all wrong. We are the problem. Objectivity has got to go,” he said.

Baron said he is having none of it. He said objectivity has to stay, pointing out that it’s better for reporters “to be arbiters of fact rather than activists and partisans.”

At the risk of being what both sides in this debate despise – someone who practices on-the-one-hand, on-the-other hand journalism — I find it difficult to discern who is right and who is wrong.

Baron takes the view that objectivity means the pursuit of truth by asking questions, listening to the answers, and keeping an open mind. It’s about determining the facts and placing them in context. The method of reporting, not the journalist, is what’s objective, he said.

He holds journalists to the same standard as judges, jurists, prosecutors, doctors, business executives, and a host of other professionals.

“The concept of objectivity in all these fields gets no argument from journalists. We accept it, embrace it, and insist on it. Journalists investigate it when we find it missing, particularly when it leads to acts of injustice,” Baron said.

“Most of the public in my experience expects my profession to be objective, too. Dismissing their expectations, outright defying them, is an act of arrogance,” he said.

While Baron stands by objectivity, Downie and Heyward seek to move beyond it. They appear to be in the camp that believes no reporter can be truly objective, but they don’t embrace activism and partisanship. They come down somewhere in between, putting forward a ”trustworthy news playbook.”

Their playbook shares many of the same goals as Baron – building newsrooms that reflect the community being covered, pursuing truth, and being transparent about how news is reported. They suggest that reporters should keep their personal views out of social media while urging news organizations to develop a set of core values.

“There is a difference between having a ‘point of view’ and engaging in advocacy journalism, although defining that line can be tricky,” Downie and Heyward say. “We are leery of claims by some journalists to have ‘moral clarity’ on controversial issues.” (That was a reference to a different vision of journalists’ role, advanced by Wesley Lowery, a former Washington Post reporter who clashed with Baron over the idea. In the Cronkite report, Lowery said he was not arguing for subjectivity. “I’m actually whole-heartedly endorsing objectivity as properly defined; the argument is that, in practice, that’s not what it is.”)

Downie and Heyward advocate for a more inclusive style of journalism. “That means striving to reach not only an audience, but all audiences, and no longer with one-size-fits-all, traditionally white male ‘objectivity,’ a journalistic concept that has lost its relevance,” they say. 

In the end, Baron and Downie and Heyward seem to have more in common than one might expect. Downie and Heyward, however, are trying to navigate a slippery slope while Baron refuses to go down that path.