Thread by @bernybelvedere

News orgs engender trust from readers by projecting their capacity to reliably produce reporting that is accurate and fair. The world is fantastically complex, which means readers want it analyzed, and want to make sure it's being done from an intellectually honest vantage point.

https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/status/1396166198707081219

I am generally against news organizations dropping personnel over political tweets, but you have to be completely ignorant of psychology to believe that a reporter publicly telegraphing his politics *isn’t* going to compromise his ability to convey impartiality in his reporting.

<tweets 10 things in a row about Israel being divinely mandated to destroy its enemies and Palestine being an evil people who are completely in the wrong>

<next day>

"Folks, here's my new report trying to make sense of the latest Israel-Palestine dust up."

Only an idiot would expect the tweets not to impact either (a) the reception of the article or (b) the capacity of the news organization to project fairness and accuracy.

(I used a fictional example, of course.)

A lot of this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of objectivity. In the context of journalism, "objectivity" isn't a metaphysical thesis. It's not a theory about reporters being able to activate some sort of epistemically pure cognitive plane.

Everybody knows the view from nowhere is an impossibility. By arguing for objectivity in reporting, nobody is suggesting human beings are capable of freeing themselves from their commitments and attachments.

Instead, objectivity is a posture precisely aimed at mitigating the prejudicial force of these beliefs and values. It's the adoption of a posture designed to curtail—albeit imperfectly—the ways our biases distort our analyses.

When objectivity is correctly practiced in journalism, it is not taken to be a form of epistemic magic. It is a set of techniques aimed at curbing a reporter's prejudices, biases, and even assumptions from steering the analysis in a way that is ultimately inaccurate or unfair.

Sometimes people take "impartiality" or "objectivity" to be some sort of proxy for *both-sides-ism*. But that's not the case. It is entirely consistent with impartiality and objectivity to say a sentence like: "Trump's disgusting lies incited January 6."

https://twitter.com/BannedHat/status/1396477324690788365?s=20

Just now, I used an example of a statement that I don't believe violates the norm of objectivity. But I pulled it from opinion journalism. Within straight reporting, objectivity allows similarly true statements, though framed more in the style of reportage.

Reporting can absolutely include the following. Notice no both-sides-ism here.

"Donald Trump has repeatedly lied about the 2020 election. January 6 rioters were galvanized by these lies, many of them rushing to stop the certification of the election."

But to circle round to the importance of objectivity in journalism, I have given two reasons: (a) the reporter is intellectually aided by adopting it and (b) both the reporter and news organization depend on the performance of objectivity to engender readership trust.

This, from yesterday, is somewhat connected:

https://twitter.com/bernybelvedere/status/1396159068318928898