Media neutrality: an incorrect yardstick for good journalism?
Bakang Ntshingane | Tuesday August 4, 2015 14:38
I intentionally exclude the state media, due to an apparently barracked space to engage. Political parties, to be specific, both ruling and opposition, carried out a string of public statements to the effect that some media houses were intentionally reporting subjectively crafted content biased against their respective parties.
Which then begs these questions, is it possible for journalists to be ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ in their reporting? Is it a fair burden to impose on journalists, that they be neutral and objective in their reporting? What does it even mean to be neutral and objective?
Media neutrality, ideally is a great principle to hold journalists to, in their media duty to keep power in check, but for pragmatic reasons, I think it’s a misplaced debate, and here’s why.
Journalists, as members of the public space, cannot be divorced from their work, neither can they be divorced from their natural association to the nation.
A concession is made, of course, that it would not help them to deal with nagging claims about their bias from those who seek reason to discredit them, if they were to publicly declare their political and ideological associations.
It is safe to assume that the parties had not found the arguments yet, to the effect that it just is wrong as a matter of good journalistic ethic and practise to show your political colours.
There is nothing wrong with having explicit party political loyalties and commitments, or ideological commitments, as a journalist.
That is a choice that you make to bring it to your work, and that inherently means that you’re ready to deal with the consequences as well.
The proverbial marketplace of ideas allows newspapers to take the risk if they so choose, to have political affiliations, explicit or otherwise. The very point of the market, means that us readers and consumers can, over time, signal whether or not we like these views, with or without their biases.
It is all part of an acceptable contestation of political, and other, ideas. It is also, let’s be frank, part of a power contestation in society. If readers think a publication is propagandist and haphazard in its reporting of facts, then readers will reject it by not buying it. Eventually, that publication gets pushed out of the market and becomes irrelevant, and that all goes back to a terrible business decision that the publication made.
Objectivity and neutrality are both NOT possible. The reason is simple. No writer, including reporters, can wholly divorce the facts of their life, their upbringing, their education, their travels, their mentors’ influences, from the reporting and writing choices they make, be these choices about what to write, or what to NOT write about; what pictures to use to accompany a story, and which ones to leave out.
This in turn means that if you look at 100 news reports a reporter has written or columns written by a columnist, you would be able to make reasonable inferences about their interests, their values, their biases, their convictions. If you don’t believe me, sample a consistent reporter or columnist from any newspaper and figure it out.
If a reporter believes in left wing economic ideas, it’s highly likely that they will always use a left wing economist’s comment as evidence to back up their claims. Society has placed an unfair and inappropriate burden on journalists. I propose an alternative yardstick to determine good journalism.
Readers want to know whether you have evidence for the claims that you make, whether the claims you make are interesting enough for them to stay with your writing, and judge your writing as good writing from a quality point of view. Quality is the MOST important.
Award winning journalists are where they are because they’ve produced well-written, evidence-backed and relevant material, not because they were neutral and objective. That is beside the point.