Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 21

The Failure of Objectivity in Journalism

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individual viewpoints deserve such serious treatment on their own
merits or not. When confronted with opposing viewpoints, the
journalist simply applies the lowest common denominator, makes
certain the opposing viewpoints are given an equal number of
arguments to justify their positions, as if the opposing arguments were
also equally convincing and valid (Hall, Media Power 22).
The implication of this process is to create the expectation that
the two sides will (and probably should) develop a compromise to
resolve their disagreement, no matter how unjust the outsiders believe
the {X)sition of the dominant classes to be and no matter how
unsatisfactory the compromise may be to them. In this way,
individual journalists become the unwitting creations of their own
ideology of objectivity which makes it extremely difficult for them to
report facts without value.
Some researchers have argued that the workways and
conventions that journalists routinely follow also often make the
pursuit of objectivity ineffectual. According to the sociologist Gaye
Tuchman, the concept of objectivity serves merely as a "strategic
ritual," one routine practice among many that journalists use to help
them function with a minimum of irritation (Making News). In this
view, journalis ts use the concept of objectivity primarily to avoid
being personally criticized for what they report: they can simply
claim that they are only acting as messengers and reporting the facts.
According to Tuchman, however, journalists do not simply collect
and report facts; instead, they are engaged in a process of
"constructing reality" by following well-established "institutional
processes in which news work is embedded" (Making News 12).
Tuchman argued that the "facts" do not exist in the real world in the
form in which they eventually appear. Rather, news organizations
have developed rigid frames of reference for identifying specific
types of news stories in order to synchronize their production
schedules with the time schedules of the bureaucracies that provide
the raw materials for their product. Events, which may vary
considerably, are stereotyped to correspond to one of these
predeternuned types in a framing process Tuchman defines as "the
social construction of patterned ways of looking at the world"
(Consciousness Industries 331).
The use of stereotypes, a process which "consists of imposing
standardized assumptions over events and conditions," has many