The Importance Of Critique On Objective Journalism

“We do not see things as they are, nor do we even see them as we are, but only as we believe our story to have been.” (Leventhal, n.d.)

In today’s world, journalism plays a crucial role in our society. They are the media watchdog, the main source of information in almost every aspect of our lives. It plays a social and a corporate responsibility to the public. And as we define journalism as the process of sorting out information, and presenting it as news to the public (Reyes, 2014). In framing it to our Philippine context, journalism is like our backbone and key inside the organizations and government; because it reports to us the information that we have to know. We now ask this question: how should a journalist simply lay out all the facts

According to Patterson & McNair (1998), “objectivity has been called the defining norm of modern journalism and the key legitimating professional ethics of liberal journalism.” The term objectivity itself means getting the two sides of the story and being unbiased with whatever information that one has. And in order to full discuss about the idea of journalism neutrality, we first need to tackle on the critiques on the nonpartisanship of journalism.

Critiques on Objective Journalism

There are different criticisms that this subject is still facing today. In Robert Cunningham’s article entitled Rethinking Objectivity (2003), there are three problematic views on objectivity. First off, is that nonpartisanship leads to having an excuse for lazy reporting. After one goes out in search for the two sides of a story, it will start to think that the complete material that he had is good enough. But this is wrong, a journalist should be an active analyzer of the story that he has gathered, and not just simply take in and vaguely report about it.

Second is the dependence of a writer to the official news sources, or for that matter, the government or the companies. This is very contradicting as we can see because there is already a heavily influenced view that a certain source gives off. The last one is the hesitance to look for evidence in fear of not getting any more knowledge from an official

An example of this is when the press tried to be objective on the lynching of the African Americans. After the lynch issue, it was reported that the press presented a full detail account for years, from around 1875 until the 1920’s on how African Americans were tortured. It really is like one horror story, wherein the press and the media seems to dehumanize these poor people. Even on the February 1982 issue of The New York Times regarding on this lynching, they even entitled it “Another Negro Burned” which is a very offensive word for the African