Peter Menzies: The Public Has Lost Faith in Legacy Media’s Ability to Be Objective

What the public still wants more than anything from reporters is accuracy and objectivity. Shutterstock

Commentary

Long at the core of journalism, the idea that reporters must be seen to conduct their work objectively is under siege. And it is losing.

The verbal trebuchets of social justice warriors chased Bari Weiss from the New York Times. National Post staff rebelled after Rex Murphy’s column questioning institutional racism was published. The Washington Post battled reporters over social media activism. National Public Radio news staff won the right to join demonstrations. Wendy Mesley mentioned a book title out loud at the CBC and a 40-year career was demolished.

And now, even the walls of the Globe and Mail have been breached.

As Globe public editor Sylvia Stead put it in her June 25 column, “Expecting objectivity of individual journalists is not the right measure,” noting she “was part of the committee of Globe editors and reporters who reviewed and recommended the changes to the Editorial Code of Conduct.”

“While the principles are rarely changed, this time one reference to ‘objectivity’ was changed to ‘fairness and transparency,’” she wrote.

And there it was, with the stroke of a pen: gone.

This coincides with and perhaps is part of a broader trend of elites and institutions increasingly doing what they please without regard to public opinion. The Globe’s shift occurred as another Canadian institution was taking a similarly dernière mode approach to maintaining public trust.

Namely, the Supreme Court of Canada and the remarks by its chief justice concerning this winter’s Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa. “What we have seen ... is the beginning of anarchy where some people have decided to take other citizens hostage, to take the law into their own hands,” the Right Honourable Richard Wagner publicly concluded in Montreal’s Le Devoir.

Complaints were filed, but were brushed aside by the Canadian Judicial Council—of which Wagner is chair. This, despite its own principles stating, “Judges should avoid using words or conduct, in and out of court, that might give rise to a reasonable perception of bias.”

Bruce Pardy, a law professor at Queen’s University, is one of the lawyers who complained about Wagner. He also has a theory on why the chief justice fails to see the issue.

Referencing the work of legal scholar Wanjiru Njoya in the Journal of Free Black Thought, Pardy suggests that “the range of what is considered reasonable has been narrowed to progressive ideals alone. ... Through a progressive lens, in other words, impartiality means having an open mind to all reasonable perspectives—but only progressive perspectives are reasonable.”

Perhaps, but no longer knowing whom to believe, the public has chosen to believe no one. “Around two thirds of Canadians believe journalists and reporters (61 percent) and business leaders (60 percent) are purposely trying to mislead them, with government not far behind (58 percent),” states the 2022 Trust Barometer for Canada by Edelman, an international communications company that studies and reports annually on public trust around the world.

The mistrust level for reporters, Edelman found, was up by 12 points year-over-year.

What the public still wants more than anything from reporters is accuracy and objectivity. According to the American Press Institute, 87 percent want the media to “verify and get the facts right,” 78 percent want it to be “fair to all sides,” 68 percent want it to be “neutral,” and 61 percent want it to “provide diverse points of view.”

News consumers don’t expect reporters to be bereft of personal beliefs. They just don’t want to hear them or have them distort the news, no matter how much journalists seem to have forgotten that the concept of objectivity was not intended to insist or pretend that individual journalists be without biases. Quite the opposite: It was developed and imposed in recognition of the fact that they are unavoidably riddled with them.

It was a 42-page study by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, titled A Test of the News and published in the New Republic in 1920, that formed the foundation for the push for objectivity.

Reviewing the New York Times’ coverage of the Russian Revolution, Lippmann and Merz’s study concluded that the reporting was often not remotely based on facts but “determined by the hopes of the men who made up the news organizations.”

“The main censor and the main propagandist,” they concluded, “was the hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.” And so did the quest begin for disciplines which would restrain the all-too human traits of bias and corruptibility.

Traditional news media are under siege largely because the public has lost faith in their ability to be good at the objective practice of their craft and see them as putting their own crusades ahead of the public interest. They are diminished because too many of their names are better known than their work. And they are increasingly under attack because too many have forgotten that journalism isn’t about them, the pursuit of their causes, and what they think. It’s about us.

A longer version of this commentary first appeared at C2CJournal.ca

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.