Deep Dive – Evolving Standards: Objectivity vs. Neutrality

Introduction

In the first installment of this series, we explored the choices that went into two headlines for an article in The Washington Post about police departments in Austin and San Francisco that had found ways to work around local rules against using facial recognition technology in their investigations.

Writing about this particular article in 2024, it is nearly impossible to overlook the fact that policing—who’s doing it, whom they’re targeting, for what purposes, and with what methods—is an issue of major national importance and one that is absolutely fraught with controversy.

In other words, it’s the kind of issue that journalists need to cover so that the public at large can make well-informed decisions about matters that will—and do—affect countless people’s lives. But in some ways, the more necessary something is to cover, the harder it becomes to do it in a way that will universally be perceived as fair or appropriate.

Making Assertions

Let’s take a look at a paragraph from the article that could potentially raise some eyebrows:

The first known false arrest linked to facial recognition was of a Black man in Detroit. His arrest was the subject of an article in the New York Times in June 2020, one month after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police fueled national protests over policing tactics in minority communities.

This paragraph states, in no uncertain terms, that George Floyd was “murdered” by the Minneapolis police. The statement is certainly justifiable, given that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was indeed found guilty of second-degree murder in 2021. The starkness of the language nevertheless surprised me, in part because when reading about episodes of police brutality, I’m much more used to seeing ambiguous phrases like “died in police custody” that do, technically, state a fact but avoid making any judgments.

I should be clear that when covering allegations of a crime, it is understandable that journalists tend to be wary, both for legal and ethical reasons, of language that could appear to establish guilt without proof. In Chauvin’s case, the crime is no longer an allegation; proof was established in a court of law. That said, without delving into all the reasons for it, politically charged and otherwise, I would venture to guess that there are still people to this day who think Chauvin was innocent, or at the very least, convicted unfairly. Isn’t The Washington Post taking a side by ignoring this perspective and simply declaring Chauvin, and the Minneapolis police by extension, guilty? Is this not a biased—and therefore non-objective—perspective?

To answer this, we have to ask ourselves what it even means to be objective.

Neutrality to a Fault

Policing is one of those subjects where the choices reporters and editors make, from the language they use to the individual and collective stories they ultimately tell, reveal all kinds of underlying biases. Even though bias—especially the concept of “unconscious bias”—can itself be a controversial subject, it is generally taken as a fundamental precept of journalism that reporters must strive for objectivity, which is often understood as a quest for truth but is also frequently interpreted—and, as we will soon see, some would argue misinterpreted—as the elimination of bias.

This seems straightforward enough on the surface; we don’t want journalists to distort the truth by hiding facts, making assumptions, or only exploring particular viewpoints. In common parlance, this might be referred to as maintaining neutrality (i.e. not taking sides), but some journalists and academics have pointed out the danger of pursuing neutrality to a fault.

NPR host Tonya Mosley writes about a boss who, in 2007, questioned whether she could be objective while covering the story of a black man shot by police:

This particular news boss wondered about my capacity for objectivity because I am black, and she held a common and misguided idea that I couldn’t be neutral or objective because my skin makes it impossible to see “all sides.” This is a common refrain, one many journalists of color have heard before—and it’s a deeply flawed idea that erodes our efforts to comprehensively cover the communities we serve.

Mosley goes on to explain that journalists “can’t be objective if they are neutral,” adding that neutrality “tries and fails to correct the real biases and prejudices of the journalist, which is impossible to do.” The idea here is that when journalists define objectivity in terms of neutrality, they inevitably silence certain voices and ideas that they deem “non-neutral” and thereby overlook entire perspectives and storylines.

Errors of Omission

In a brief yet potent blog post for the Cambridge University Press, Sociology professor Douglas Porpora explores the nuanced nature of objectivity by way of a thought game wherein he asks readers to decide which of three increasingly pointed statements about the nature of the Holocaust is the “most objective.” (Spoiler: the correct answer is the least neutral of the bunch.)

Porpora warns that by equating objectivity with absolute neutrality, one risks papering over unpleasant yet important facts in order to avoid the appearance of moral judgment, noting that while there are often two sides to a story, “the truth is not always in between—or at least not smack in the middle.” Porpora also cautions against what I have sometimes heard referred to as “bothsidesism.” To present the two sides as if they are “equally cogent” in an effort to be neutral, Porpora writes, “is to distort the truth.”

The possibly startling implication of Mosley and Porpora’s perspectives is that oftentimes the truth is not neutral. If reporters don’t directly confront and acknowledge harsh realities—thorny subjects like murder, genocide, systemic racism—then they are not fulfilling their obligation to the truth. And by the same token (though this is by far the more radical concept), some perspectives may simply not be worthy of attention. The challenge, of course, lies in determining which ones need to be given space—or more space than before—and which should be given less—or none. And this, of course, gets back to Mosley’s larger point about who gets to do the reporting and tell us the news in the first place.

Going the Distance

While thinking about this subject, I came across an article from the Poynter Institute by Roy Peter Clark, in which he argues that rather than using objectivity itself as the standard by which we evaluate media, we should classify publications based on “distance from neutrality.” Clark envisions a five-point scale that still concedes the value of traditionally neutral publications (ranked at point 1) but also acknowledges the role for what he calls “engaged” journalism (ranked at point 2) which, he says, “finds paths to public service that do not always require neutrality as a value.”

He elaborates:

What is sometimes thought of as antagonistic to neutral journalism is here reimagined as a positive, such as a belief in the value of diverse points of view on the same experience. It is the direction where many news organizations are leaning, but it lacks a name.

Clark goes on to list some of the hallmarks of engaged journalism, including plenty of familiar concepts like fact-checking and the clear differentiation of fact from opinion. Among what sets this brand of journalism apart, though, in Clark’s telling are a willingness to use more charged language to characterize a position, an absence of false equivalency, choices (both intentional and unintentional) in what stories get told, and an acknowledgement that there are certain issues that do not require neutrality.

Occupying the remaining positions on Clark’s distance scale, for the record, are advocacy journalism, partisan media, and propaganda, in that order.

Bringing It All Together

Let’s return to the Post’s article.

To my eyes, the reporting does strive to maintain at least some level of impartiality (to be “fair and balanced,” to cite a since-retired Fox News slogan). Nearly every accusation of wrongdoing on one side is followed up by a defense attributed to the other side. When no defense is provided, the reporter makes it clear that he tried to obtain a comment. That’s basic journalistic integrity, and it sounds at first a lot like one of Clark’s “neutral” publications.

But when you take a step back, the overall package, especially the headline (“These cities bar facial recognition tech. Police still found ways to access it.”), does kind of seem to be taking a side. The story is not framed as “Activists accuse police of misconduct,” which if not 100% disinterested, would certainly be a more neutral approach. Nor is it framed as “Police defend their use of facial recognition,” which could also accurately describe at least some of the article but would be a very different angle.

Instead, a determination has been made—the police in these cities skirted the rules—just as a determination was distinctly made about what happened in Minneapolis.

In both cases, one could argue (and plenty people do) that the media has an agenda (i.e. a very conscious bias driving their coverage decisions). Or, if the principles of journalism include such goals as seeking out the truth, holding the powerful to account, and giving voice to the voiceless, perhaps one could argue that meaningful objectivity requires reporters to take a side sometimes, perhaps even a lot of the time. Facts mean little without context—the human experience surrounding those facts—and context, it turns out, is complicated, frequently controversial, and inevitably biased.

In other words, what a single, somewhat tangential paragraph in an article about police and technology ultimately leads me to consider is this: if news outlets actually want to do good work, then they need to heed Mosley’s warning against stamping out supposedly non-neutral voices and perspectives, even if that means practicing a more “engaged” form of journalism, to borrow Clark’s term.

While neutrality may superficially feel objective, it is almost certainly less equitable and, to the extent that it diminishes or covers up real human experience, not always all that truthful either.