1/ Time for another report from Berlin, midway in my stay at @BoschAcademy. I'm studying German pressthink this summer. This thread is my notebook on What Objectivity Seems to Mean in German Journalism. To an outsider. So if that title excites you, you're in the right place.
2/ This week I interviewed leadership and staff at New German Media Makers, @NDMedienmacher, a support network and advocacy group for journalists with a "migration background" who are working in German Media. goethe.de/en/kul/med/208… We talked for an hour just about objectivity.
3/ I have put questions about 'objectivity' in the German press to about 40 other people in the field, including editors, reporters and trainees, news executives, specialists in the study of it, heavy users of the product, like embassy staff. These are notes from those talks.
4/ Main finding: Within professional circles in German journalism, objectivity has prestige. Both the term and the practice to which the term points are eagerly defended, seen as part of professional excellence. Critiques are acknowledged. The ideal is thought to withstand them.
5/ My claim,"Objectivity has [surprising] prestige in German journalism..." is, I think, directionally true, but it is not true for all. More so at the top than at the entry levels. Less so for the generation entering now, less so among those who identify as digital journalists.
6/ Objectivity in professional journalism is a doctrine so simple and provocative to the field that whole subfields (like framing decisions in news) are devoted to doubting it. I am myself a participant. My term for doubting it is, The View from Nowhere. pressthink.org/2010/11/the-vi…
7/ Second find. The critique of objectivity, the demystifying of that term, is the same in Germany as it is around the world. There is no such thing as judgment-free journalism. It isn't possible to remove yourself like that. Get real with us. You are always framing the story.
8/ Fans and spiritual supporters of objectivity in German journalism (there are many of these) wish to remind their peers: Journalists are not supposed to be part of a cause, even a good cause. They are supposed to be cool and impartial observers, relentless in saying what is.
9/ A key fact about objectivity in German journalism: not a native species, but an Anglo-American import. Introduced with the rebuilding of the press and broadcasting system after 1945. But it came to be associated with professionalism by (some) journalists in the Bonn Republic.
10/ My academic friends call the same construct neutral professionalism, a way for journalists to generate authority and win trust as documenters of the real. 'We're not on anyone's side. We have no agenda. We keep our distance. We're here to find the story and tell the world.'
11/ This kind of claim is coming under strain in Germany from several directions. Economic pressures make click bait publishing in all its forms apparent to all. It's not neutral. Right wing populists are calling journalists part of the system for keeping them down: systempresse.
12/ Journalists in Germany worry that the political press is too clubby and intimate with parties in government. Journalists themselves brought up to me a narrowness of mind, an out-of-touch-ness made more likely by newsrooms full of people from big cities and good universities.
13. None of that sounds very objective. But as I listened to German journalists talk about the term, they were elastic. "We need to stay objective" was a warning about straying too far into politics. It could also mean staying independent, or remaining fact-based. Saying what is.
14. "Avoid getting swept into politics..." Harder than it looks. Right wing populism tries to drag The Media into politics, by accusing it of bias, yes, but also by changing conditions of reception (academic term) among supporters to a climate of attack, suspicion and dismissal.
15. Imagine a political movement able to turn you into a hate object for 10%... then 15%... or let's say 25-30% of the electorate, which is where are in the United States, so that before journalists log on in the morning, one quarter of their potential public is already vanished.
16. Now in a situation like that — fighting a political force trying to make you irrelevant to the fight, when you have a self-understanding that is apolitical — you may find that objectivity and neutral professionalism have limited value in figuring out what to do.
17. These are an outsider's first wave impressions as of July 25. I have five weeks left on my fellowship pressthink.org/2018/05/will-s… to correct my errors of interpretation here and to figure out what I missed in these notes.
