Filed under: J840 Week 4, Society + Media | Tags: culture, journalism, objectivity, tabula rasa
We are not blank pages when we start writing a story.
Here’s my problem with the term “journalistic objectivity.” Nobody, no matter how hard they try, can see through eyes other than their own. No journalist is a tabula rasa on which the facts of a story can be written. We write through cultural filters, and we can’t help it.
Our culture defines who we are and how we see things. Two people raised in two different cultures can draw completely different conclusions on the exact same set of facts. And in their cultural setting, each would be correct. In 1991 researchers Markus and Kitayama concluded that culture ”can influence and in many cases determine the very nature of individual experience, including cognition, emotion and motivation.”
This research is becoming real to me as I get to know the father of my granddaughter. I am the product of married, middle-class, college-educated, Caucasian parents, and grew up in the suburbs of a city in the northeast. He is African American, and grew up welfare-poor in rural southeast Kansas. His mother was 14-years-old when he was born, and he was raised by his grandmother. Both he and his father have spent time in jail. Last summer he lived with us for a few weeks. In that time my eyes were opened to a completely different way of thinking. I found my jaw dropping into my lap quite often, as he routinely spoke of things that I consider criminal/anti-social/reprehensible as a normal way of life. Most memorable was the time he spoke of a friend who “disappeared” after he cooperated with the police in the investigation of the death of an acquaintance. It was just another every-day occurence for him. I hope he couldn’t see how mortified I was.
If, as Markus and Kitayama concluded, culture is deterministic on our cognition and the way we interpret facts and events, how can we hope to be objective in journalism, or any kind of communication?
Cindy Olsen
Filed under: J840 Week 4, Society + Media | Tags: blogs, journalists, media, objectivity, traditional news
I believe most journalists do strive to be objective. However, I wonder if the changing landscape of the media has made an impact on the way “traditional” journalists report the news.
The ways people find and read news are changing as technology progresses. Will this eventually lead to a change in the way traditional journalists cover news?
During the past couple of years, the emergence of blogs and other similar internet communication functions has made it seem that anyone with knowledge about how to use these types of tools, and an opinion about any issue to share with others, can become a journalist in a sense. As bloggers have built audiences and new technology has changed the way people communicate, traditional journalism seems to be struggling. At wordpress.com, there are more than 205,000 bloggers, but less people are taking time to read a traditional newspaper or watch a traditional evening newscast. Instead people are finding news online when they want it and from a variety of traditional and non-traditional sources. This new behavior seems to be leading to layoffs at newspapers across the country while driving down profits at media companies.
As the pool of traditional journalists becomes smaller, they will be more stretched to cover a variety of topics, as opposed to in the past, when they may have been able to specialize in specific areas or beats. As they have less time to spend researching topics or gathering their own data, I wonder if it will become harder and harder to be objective and not be swayed by packaged data and messages from external sources, such as special interest groups — which represent the views of their own clients. In turn, because the traditional journalists likely work for still-well-respected news sources, they may set the tone about an issue for readers, bloggers, etc., who in turn perpetuate that message.
I’ve never worked as a journalist — this is only my perception about the ways the industry seems to be changing. I’m curious to hear from others who have worked directly within the industry, to see if this perception is true.
-Jennifer E.
