Five Challenges to Objectivity

• In Event: Journalistic Norms and Practices

Abstract

As is well known, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, most major news organizations embraced objectivity as a normative goal for their reporting. Yet almost from the moment it became a media standard, a series of groups and movements have challenged objectivity as being, in various ways, wrong, inadequate, or insufficient. In this paper, I review five such challenges -- muckraking, interpretive reporting, the underground press of the 1960s, the new journalism, and the conflict between objective reporting and the desire for a more diverse news staff. The result is that by the early years of the twenty-first century, many news organizations, journalists, and journalism educators had begun to maintain that objectivity was no longer a proper goal.

Author

• William G. Mayer, Northeastern University