When journalists talk about “transparency,” what they invariably mean is that the people they cover should share all of their secrets. Meanwhile, journalists believe they should never be asked to share anything about their own process that might enhance or detract from the audience’s view of their credibility.
A new Wall Street Journal op-ed by Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper, is a perfect case study. Hussman’s point is that the traditional news media might save or even repair their credibility with the public by recommitting themselves to the “core values” that they otherwise pretend to care about.
Hussman wrote that news organizations need to prove that they’re “fair, objective and impartial” and that “impartiality means reporting, editing, and delivering the news honestly, fairly, objectively, and without opinion or bias.”
He said that “the best way” to achieve that goal was “transparency.” What kind of transparency? “Publicly stating our core values,” he said.
That’s hilarious. The national press is not now, nor was it ever, interested in selling “objective” or even “impartial” reporting. News organizations can aspire to be “fair,” and that’s about the best anyone can expect.
But “transparency” is never something that journalists truly embrace on their own end. They’re loath to reveal their sources, or their editing process, or how they learned about the initial information that leads them to their stories.
Any professional in the news business who cares about “transparency” should be willing to admit a few things, and Hussman admits none of them.
First, journalism requires private deal-making. It’s transactional. If I want to know a secret from someone, there’s a good chance that, in turn, I have to promise not to print that person’s name or anything that would jeopardize their career or reputation. Or, if there’s a famous person who is willing to talk with me, I might in turn have to promise not to write (at least immediately) about some unknown but embarrassing story that they don’t want made public.
Journalism is like any other practice that involves negotiation. There’s a lot of reason to hate this fact, and media critics out there are right to call it out, but it’s a fact of nonetheless.
Second, journalism requires purely subjective judgment calls on any number of things. Is this story interesting enough to write about or air on TV in the first place? Which piece of information should go at the top? Do I trust this expert enough to quote him? Am I relying on an expert because I know in advance that he’ll give me the quote I want?
On and on it goes. For any of these decisions, the journalist has to insert personal judgment to make one decision over the other. There’s no machine to make any of these decisions and if there were, it would only be as good as the person who built it.
The notion that “objective” journalism is simply a matter of “he said, she said and these are the facts” is a lie, and it would make for very boring stories if it weren’t. A lot of times, what he said or what she said isn’t true or isn’t fully true. Facts have a way of taking sides. Perhaps what he said is a lie and what she said is true, or vice versa. Or maybe what they both said is true, but the journalist has to be the one to figure out the context to both that makes it so.
Third, journalists often (maybe more often than not) know that what they’re printing is not the full story. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to print the whole story, either by nature of fairness to someone else — certain facts can’t be nailed down and there are time constraints — or for what it will cost financially if the full story turns out impossible to prove.
Befriend a journalist, and they’ll probably have a story about facts that never made it into a major article. Those details are frequently more interesting than the story that made it to print. Out of a reasonable bias toward fairness, though, the journalist might have to exclude them. That’s often necessary. For example, if a neighbor calls you a pedophile and a third person overhears it, it would be unfair to report it without knowing if the claim had any merit at all.
Journalists don’t have to pretend that they’re sharing everything they know or have heard. They can admit that they can’t, or that they won’t, and why. Paradoxically, that would be more transparent than what they tend to do now.
This is what “transparency” would look like in every news report if journalists were actually interested in the concept. But they’re not. They’re interested in a fleeting idea about what the media should be, or what the public should believe it is.
People are no longer buying the traditional journalism myth about “objectivity” and “impartiality.” Those things don’t exist. They might, however, start buying into transparency, to whatever extent and in whatever quarters the media decide to start giving it to them.
