Sociology

What is Objectivity
It is the unbiased, accurate picture of reality (Everyday Meaning)

Set of Practices to Get the AchievementAccomplishment of Objectivity (In Relation to Mainstream Media Such as Daily Newspapers, Network News, Etc.)

Why do journalists care about practicing objectivity
Because they are frequently criticized In order to avoid being criticized and being embarrassed. It is just like the example when peasants use garlic to avoid vampires.)

Liable Lawsuit  in America, it is legal to say bad things or untrue stories about people
Malice Standard  it is illegal to say bad things about people that you know that are true, Britain lacks the

Malice Standard
Ex Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie suing the British newspaper for saying that their relationship is in trouble. You have American periodicals saying things about Americans and foreign periodicals saying the same things about Americans but these Americans are suing the foreign periodicals, leaving the American periodicals because we dont really know the truth. Its a reasonable thing to debate about. You dont have to be careful of what you say in America because you think youre going to be sued but because in practice it is very difficult to sue someone in American courts but even if you dont get sued, its embarrassing to be criticized.

Ex. CBS News destroyed their reputation by saying something about President Bush in 2004 that turned out not to be true. Specifically they were lied on forged memos that said Bush was a slacker and a drunk with the default settings of Microsoft word. He didnt sue CBS but their reputation got destroyed.

Example used for the following themesformula by Tuchman Yesterdays L.A. Times article about Black Pro-Life Activists (Because black women are more likely to have abortions). The two stickiest issues are abortion and racial distrust. No one in their right mind would write something like this without exposing themselves to criticism. They are going to write this in a way that is going to make it difficult for anybody to criticize them. How do you go about writing something by being very objective where people have different views or ideas about a certain issue

Verification  the reporter should verify facts. What is a fact It is a kind of thing that you can check out to prove that something is accepted regardless of what they think about it. Ex A picture of a billboard put up verifying that there are pro-life activists about black women. A verifiable fact is something that any knowledgeable person would have confirmed about certain information. Ex Statistics show that black women have more abortions. This is not common knowledge.

Conflicting Possibilities  deals with empirical claims which there might be a fact to some matter but what it is, is difficult to establish. So in principle, there is an answer out there. In principle, there is a right answer but we dont know what it is because it is difficult to establish what it is. For instance in the example article, why do abortion rates differ by race In principle, there is an answer to that. Its a factual question, not a normative question. There is no conceivable answer to that question that you could give that everybody could agree on. What the writer does is that he reports but the readers decide. In this case, the writer goes about it by saying that it could be because of inadequate insurance coverage or white elites are fearful of uncontrolled population growth in direct quotes from the example article. Journalists get both sides of the story and they dont get quotes directly contradicting another quote. In practice, when they get both sides of the story, they make it a pros and cons concept. In doing so, it avoids the distinction between valid or invalid arguments. A clever partisan could skew news coverage by demanding equitable treatment for an absurd position. Ex A story on anti-depressants that gave equal prominence and credibility to the positions about anti-depressants given to where one of the sources are from professors of psychopharmacology and the other source is somebody from scientology people because they dont like anti-depressants. In reality, one of the sources is credible and the other isnt.

Supporting Evidence  a contentious claim especially given in the journalists own voice rather than in a quote. A contentious claim has to be backed up. Ex The doctor is a quack or a butcher, thats not a kind of claim you could just make. You have to have supporting evidence like, Hes been disciplined by his accrediting body several times. He was just suspended from the board for 6 months. Those could be treated as supporting evidence to a contentious claim on a doctors credentials.

Judicious Use of Quotation Marks  Journalists have to be especially careful of what they say in the main narrative of their story which is the most dangerous part. Anything that is potentially controversial, the journalist would usually use the voice of the source rather than his own voice, usually a quote, sometimes a paraphrase. In the example article, the really uncontentious claims are put in the journalists voice, the moderately contentious claims are put in paraphrases attributed to some vague group of people and the really contentious claims are direct quotes. The more controversial it is, the more quotey it gets. No journalist in their right mind would say, If this bill passes, it will ruin the economy. But he would say, According to Professor so and so, this bill will send our economy into recession. The journalist cannot make a claim themselves in the main narrative of the article. Then the journalist would not be blamed. Tuchmans Ex An anti-war reporter who was so good at using quotes and in such a way that his more hockish editors found the covers to be objective. But because the reporter was so skillful at putting all the anti-war material within direct quotations, the editor thought it was a really good story even though they disagreed on the issue. An implication is that often journalists will decide on what they want to write and will find someone official sounding willing to say it. They are never open-ended. Its like you write the story first and you fill in the quotes later. Another implication, you use quotation marks for things that are controversial but that kind of presupposes that you know what is controversial. If you look at a long running story over time, you see interesting patterns in what is putting quotation marks and what is putting the journalists own voice. Ex Brian Powel on the Guaranteed Minimum Income Policy 1970s and Kioko Satos Genetically Modified Crops 1990s. This is the life cycle of a story wherein early on in a long running story, they found out that everything appears in quotation marks, as the story matures, certain things will be black boxed and put in the narrative. Ex Health Care Reform on the Three Legged Stool (Mandate (Community Rating (Pre-existing Condition) (Subsidiary. When you go back to when people started talking seriously about this, this is the kind of thing that a journalist would get a direct quote from an expert. Theyd say, According to Professor so and so, you need all three of these to work. If you just use one of them, it will create problems. Early on in the story, this idea would have appeared in a direct quotation from an expert. Now, if you open the newspaper today and you see something on the Three Legged Stool its the kind of thing the journalist himself would be saying in the main body of the journalists narrative. It started out as something controversial where the journalist needed an expert to say it in direct quote. Now, the story is mature enough that people on all sides of the issue basically realizeagree that these things go together. It became uncontroversial. It has fallen out of quotation marks as the story matured.

Structuring Information in Appropriate Sequence  this is something that the example article doesnt really do as it is the main example. In general, journalists tend to be very careful in the way they structure stories. One of the basic ways to structure information in a story is the Inverted Pyramid Structure which is anything that is worth knowing is placed in the first paragraph and the rest of the article is all fillers and details that arent so interesting. This is because they assume that readers only usually read the first partfront page of the newspaper and when it says more on page 11 people arent actually going to turn to page 11. Similar to a website. If it is a single page website, you just read a paragraph or two then decide not to read the rest of it, or if its like click on page 2 because they want to get another ad impression, you may say that Ive learned everything I need to know so you decide not to click on page 2. So they put all the good stuff at the beginning of the story. A problem with this is that a lot of these objective practices, one of the consequences is that they make things very wordy and they take up a lot of space. What that means is that you cant do it all in the first paragraph because you dont have room for quotation marks, verification, conflicting possibilities and etc. You have to get to the core of the story. But if you do that, you have the risk that its unbalanced. Journalists try to keep the first paragraph as objective as possible. They try to avoid any contentious claims inside or outside quotation marks because they dont have time to add the 5 words of According to so and so because you have to say but on the other hand, so and so and so There is no time to balance things. What you tend to do in the first paragraph is focus on the 5 Ws  WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE and WHY. Ex WhoPro-life activists (Many of them Black), WhatAd campaign to increase black opposition to abortion, Whenright about now, WhereGeorgia, Whybecause they dont like abortion. These are objective facts and it focuses more on uncontentious stuff. More contentious things will be placed in the following paragraphs because there is now more space to do quotations and etc.

Common Sense  knowing when its ok not to do all these stuffideas, not to take things too serious because it makes the journalists job more difficult and it becomes very boring. There is going to be a temptation to avoid it as much as possible. Ex The journalist doesnt track down a cute baby expert to say that the baby is cute according to the example article. Its the kind of thing that the journalist would say, Nobody is going to be upset if I say the baby is cute. Because first of all, it is common sense that the baby is cute. You dont need all those objectivities for a claim that that baby in the picture of the article is cute. No newspaper article would say, According to so and so, California is in the west coast of the US. These things are common knowledge, you dont need evidence, and you dont need to practice objectivity or to put in quotes. When common knowledge starts, objectivity can end. One of the issues is that this can be abused. Common knowledge can also be flat out wrong. Tuchmans Ex A journalist wrote a story saying L.B.J. was either going to lose the primary or quit in 1968. And the editor refused this. Because the journalist said everybody knows that presidential incumbents always either fight or win the primary. L.B.J. didnt run for re-election for the democratic primary in 1968. The editor didnt know that.

Historical Origins of Journalistic Objectivity

Where did all this come from How did we get all this (From the above mentioned)
This is a historical contingency development
This is something that existed from the mid  20th century
It was at its peak from the 50s through the 90s
It didnt really exist before the civil war and it might not exist anymore in a few decades
In the early republic, there were plenty of newspapers, very popular in the US, basically all these stuff were not true. All these stuff were true in the mid to late 20th century. They were really different in the 19th century, all these as Tuchman describes didnt exist in the 19th century. Back then, newspapers didnt try to be objective, most of them were open for partisan or active for an organized power base like a church, which used to be much more common back then. Before the progressive era, politics was largely organized around the concept of patronage which was dividing up the resources for your followers but now, it is when a new person comes in the office and they fire everybody and replace them with their supporters. There wasnt an idea of professionalism. The political parties of before had weak ideological ideasplatforms. Newspapers were part of the patronage system, they benefited when their party was at power. Cash subsidies within political parties would just pay newspapers. On the other hand, indirect patronage was when there wasnt a fine distinction between newspapers and printing offices. Imagine if your local kinkos published a newsletter and the guy who ran that kinkos was both the editor of that newsletter and he ran that kinkos. This was more or less what early newspapers were like. The way it works is that you would have your newspaper say nice things about a political party then when that party got into power it would direct government contracts to that printer. There is now the government printing office in order to avoid the government giving printing contracts to newspapers as a patronage system.

Why the change Because of the invention of the high speed printing press in the mid 19th century. These new high speed printing presses were very expensive but they made a lot of copies, you have higher fixed costs and lower marginal costs.

Implications
Small print runs were no longer profitable.
Larger print runs made you had to appeal to more people  niche partitioning model which is mainstream appealing product wherein you have a large scale producer. That producer has to be a generalist. The single best predictor of how idealogically skewed a newspaper is, is how idealogically skewed the local population is.

Advertising  development of consumerism and brand named products. Brand loyalty implies advertising. Advertisers are interested in reaching a large amount of audience.

The model of everybody reads the newspaper is fading away. Why Because of legal changes, increasing shift to partisanideological media, because all this stuff kills the literary style of journalism and because of the rise of digital technology.