The Myth of Objectivity

A recurring rap against the press is that it lacks objectivity. The criticism is fair, in the sense that it is almost impossible to be completely objective. Subjectivity always creeps into the choices made by reporters and editors on what to include or what to emphasize in a story. News people are all too human, and sometimes they are not even aware of their biases. But on the whole, the mainstream press does try, with imperfect results, to be fair. The big news organizations are not at all relaxed about getting it wrong. Big mistakes—fraud, plagiarism, outright deceit—can kill careers.

Much of the suspicion of press bias comes from two assumptions that are commonplace, if contradictory. The first is that reporters are out to get their subjects. The second is that the press is too close to its subjects—in the parlance of journalists, "in the tank." The press has been guilty of both sins at various times. Examining the way the pendulum swings between these poles—between fawning and negativity—is a useful way of understanding how the press operates. Rare is the reporter who can be both an insider and outsider (Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post from 1968 to 1991, comes to mind). Public officials tend to dislike journalists, but are forced to deal with them. As Lyndon Johnson once said, he would rather have someone "inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in."

There was a time, in the years of the early cold war, when the press was too cozy with high government officials. The great Washington columnist Walter Lippmann would visit the Oval Office to give the president his thoughts for a speech. Then Lippmann would write a column praising the speech. Reporters favored with leaks from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI were known as "F.O.B.s"—Friends of Bureau. They never reported that Hoover was blackmailing politicians and bugging civil-rights leaders. At fancy Georgetown dinner parties, CIA officials hobnobbed with columnist Joseph Alsop, knowing that their secrets—coup plots, black ops—were safe with their social peer and fellow patriot.

Then came Vietnam and Watergate and a golden age for muckraking. President Johnson lied to the press so often that the "credibility gap" was born. Uncovering Nixon's misdeeds made movie heroes out of two young Washington Post city-desk reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Suddenly it was cool to become a journalist, cooler still to be an investigative journalist. Newspapers began cranking out multipart series that were unreadable and often proved little (while insinuating a lot), but won the occasional prize. A giant scandal machine took over Washington, exposing wrongdoing and keeping politicians honest, but also frightening them from public service or punishing them for peccadilloes. The nadir may have been the Gary Condit–intern scandal in the spring and summer of 2001, during which the national press corps spent weeks hounding an obscure congressman for a murder he did not commit—though he did admit to an affair (according to later news reports) and, at first, allowed his staff to deny it.

After 9/11, the scandal machine shut down—for a time. Journalists were dealing again with questions of war and peace, and it seemed, for the moment at least, that the profession was ennobled by crisis. Then came Iraq. Some big-time journalists (a) were scared that Al Qaeda would attack their homes, New York and Washington, and (b) bought into the idea, albeit with misgivings, that toppling Saddam Hussein would make the country safer.

Burned by the WMD fiasco, most news organizations took up the cudgels again. Defying a personal plea from President Bush, The New York Times exposed extensive electronic eavesdropping on citizens in the war on terror. While controversial, the decision to reveal the eavesdropping program was in the public interest. Much more questionable was the Times's later decision to publicize how intelligence officials tapped into a bank clearinghouse in Europe to follow terrorist money. The article gave terrorists all the warning they needed to avoid such money transfers, while the spying program had been authorized by Congress. The Times's justification for such a damaging revelation was that the paper was guarding against a potential abuse of power.