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Objectivity hasn’t always been a cornerstone of journalism. American publishers first turned to objectivity in the early twentieth century, in response to the freewheeling “yellow journalism” common at the time. Readers embraced it, grateful for a withdrawal from sensationalism and opinionated coverage.  

American journalist Walter Lippmann, one of the early champions of objectivity, saw the dangers posed by propaganda masquerading as news and argued in 1920 that the “sensible procedure in matters affecting the liberty of opinion would be to ensure as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.” 

A century later, in early 2023, retired Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron explained Lippmann’s intent: “Our job as journalists, as he saw it, was to determine the facts and place them in context. The goal should be to have our work be as scientific as we could make it. Our research would be conscientious and careful. We would be guided by what the evidence showed. That meant we had to be generous listeners and eager learners, especially conscious of our own suppositions, prejudices, preexisting opinions and limited knowledge.”

As a result, much of modern journalism has been framed by what philosopher Thomas Nagel calls the “view from nowhere”—idealizing detached fact-finding as a source of truth. 

But in recent years, as newsrooms have diversified beyond the white, Western, and male culture upon which it rests, this approach has been scrutinized. Should journalists reconsider the ethical merits of objectivity, and if so, how? 

In his 2010 criticism of the view from nowhere, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote that this idea has “unearned authority in the American press. If in doing the serious work of journalism—digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat—you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The ‘view from nowhere’ doesn’t know from this. It also encourages journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong.”

More recently, Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young, authors of 2019’s Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities, argued that objectivity as an ethical standard is both impossible and harmful. 

“Recognizing that the individual journalist has a view from somewhere, and that journalism has been doing all kinds of work in the past, allows you to have clarity about what you’re contributing as a journalist, about whose social order you’re maintaining,” Callison said in a 2020 CBC interview.  

The question of “whose social order you’re maintaining” hits especially hard for journalists from marginalized communities, many of whom question how objectivity may reinforce or neglect to correct racist, sexist, or transphobic ideologies. While journalists, including Rosen and Callison, had long been raising questions around journalistic objectivity, nothing served to decenter objectivity-as-central-tenet more than the 2020 death of George Floyd and the racial reckoning in the media industry that followed. 

That summer, journalists at the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times, among many others, lodged both internal and public complaints about how their outlets deployed an overcorrective both-sides-ism in their coverage of Floyd’s killing and the subsequent mass protests against racist police violence. Black journalists also called out biased treatment from their employers. 

At the New York Times, staffers protested the decision of editorial-page editor James Bennet to run an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton urging the US government to use military force against Black Lives Matter protesters. Dozens of Times employees tweeted, “Running this puts Black NYTimes staff in danger.”  

Two days after Cotton’s column ran, editors added a note to the top of the piece online noting the internal debate: “After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” 

The note went on to say that, “given the life-and-death importance of the topic, the senator’s influential position, and the gravity of the steps he advocates, the essay should have undergone the highest level of scrutiny. Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed, and senior editors were not sufficiently involved.” Bennet resigned three days after the op-ed was published. 

That summer was, for many journalists, an inflection point. Former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery published an op-ed in the Times challenging the “gaze of white editors” and calling out the industry’s failure to recruit and retain journalists of color. To his point, a 2022 Pew survey of twelve thousand working journalists found that only 6 percent of journalists are Black, 8 percent are Hispanic, and 3 percent are Asian. 

“Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago from an openly partisan press to a model of professed objectivity, the mainstream has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses,” he wrote. “And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers. On opinion pages, the contours of acceptable public debate have largely been determined through the gaze of white editors.” (In May, CJR published an investigation in which several women alleged that Lowery sexually assaulted them.)

Lowery’s critique of objectivity gained support across the industry. A Nieman Lab survey of articles about objectivity from the Columbia Journalism Review, Nieman Journalism Lab, and Poynter written between 2020 and 2022 found that the vast majority took a “very negative” or “somewhat negative” view of the concept. 

Not everyone agrees that the principle of objectivity should be thrown out entirely. NPR standards editor Tony Cavin argues that “journalistic principles that have been used by traditionally a small group of white men to set the news agenda are not bad in themselves. They’ve just been used badly. And they haven’t been used by everyone. So what you need is more people in that room deciding how to use those principles.”

“I think everyone has their own biases, and I think it’s really important to try to figure out what those are and acknowledge them and take steps to counteract what they might be,” said Eileen O’Reilly, managing editor of standards and training at Axios. “Some of those steps include making sure you have editors from different backgrounds looking over your stories and also talking about issues ahead of time before people do the reporting.”

And what constitutes “fair and balanced” coverage is often a heated point of debate. 

“In this particular moment, with respect to issues like Gaza, there’s an added challenge to offer moral certainty around issues—it holds the media to a high moral bar and considers it a moral failure if an outlet doesn’t cover things in a particular way,” one newsroom standards editor, who requested anonymity, told us. 

Stephen J.A. Ward, a lecturer in ethics at the University of British Columbia and the author of several books on media ethics, believes that digital media calls traditional ethics into question. He questions the value journalists place on telling both sides of a story.

“I mean, does anybody reporting on child abuse go and get the other side? No, there is no neutrality,” he said.

New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker has covered presidents going back to Bill Clinton. He revealed in 2020 that, for the sake of political impartiality, he abstains from voting. Younger generations of journalists are less willing to make such personal sacrifices in the name of objectivity. 

“The consensus among younger journalists is that we got it all wrong,” Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor in chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, told former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. They believe: “objectivity has got to go.”

In some cases, that has led to newsrooms leaning into their reporters’ personal perspectives, as when reporter Kevin Rector of the LA Times wrote about the legal threats to gay marriage via the lens of his same-sex marriage. 

But just as often, editors have conspicuously removed reporters from covering certain stories out of fear of bias. 

In 2020, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor Alexis Johnson and another Black reporter on staff were taken off coverage of Black Lives Matter protests because they had demonstrated “bias” in the form of tweeting commentary on the panic over the protests. In 2021, Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez sued the Post in part for preventing her from covering stories about sexual assault after she revealed she was an assault survivor. (A judge dismissed the case in 2022; an appeals court revived aspects of the case early this year, and litigation continues.) 

Other newsrooms have opened their policies on journalists’ participation in protests. In 2020, Axios sent a memo to staff saying, “We proudly support and encourage you to exercise your rights to free speech, press, and protest.”

NPR issued a vaguely worded policy allowing journalists to “express support for democratic, civic values that are core to NPR’s work, such as, but not limited to: the freedom and dignity of human beings, the rights of a free and independent press, the right to thrive in society without facing discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, disability, or religion.” Still, NPR prohibits journalists from participating in protests or rallies that are “controversial” or “polarizing,” and many newsrooms prohibit journalists from publicly taking sides on issues they deem outside the scope of human rights, like abortion.

“There is definitely a generational tension going on right now in newsrooms between traditional notions of things like objectivity and younger journalists who are more comfortable with advocacy than their older mentors and editors and news directors may be,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. 

Culver, who is studying how college papers’ coverage of protests differs from that of traditional mainstream media outlets, recalled receiving an email from a public media newsroom leader complaining that her staff demanded to support Black Lives Matter in their social media profiles. Within minutes, she received an email from a staffer in the same newsroom complaining about the manager.

“Journalism is not objective, and we all know this,” said University of Missouri associate journalism professor Jared Schroeder. “All objectivity is setting up a set of processes and practices to do your best to be objective. It’s a system; it’s not a goal; it’s not an automatic outcome. Journalism is supposed to be providing information to audiences that is accurate and useful for democracy. Well, if that’s the end goal, then your systems and your processes, your practices, should align with reaching that goal, which I think that approach would leave room for different ways of getting there, because the objectivity that is taught in journalism schools generally, historically and traditionally is a one-way system.”

Ward, the University of British Columbia ethicist, calls for a “democratically engaged” model of journalism where journalists are “objective advocates for plural democracy.” 

“We’re not talking about perfect impartiality, not having any emotions. What we’re talking about is the disciplining of your mind, so that you will allow the best evidence,” he said.

A potential middle ground between advocacy journalism and traditional objectivity is solutions journalism, a reporting style that has gained in popularity in recent decades, spurred in part by the 2013 founding of the Solutions Journalism Network. The gist of solutions journalism is to examine how society is responding to a social problem and review the evidence to see whether the response is effective by talking with industry experts and the public. The media industry has largely been critical of solutions journalism, saying it risks straying into advocacy or focuses too much on upbeat stories.

But SJN cofounder David Bornstein, a former New York Times reporter, told the Associated Press in a 2023 interview that solutions journalism isn’t just looking for good news to cover. “It’s rigorous reporting that is examining how people are responding to problems,” he said.For his part Baron, the retired Post editor, is firm in his support of the objective ideals. “Failure to achieve standards does not obviate the need for them. It does not render them outmoded. It makes them more necessary. And it requires that we apply them more consistently and enforce them more firmly,” he wrote.

Update: An earlier version of this article did not include an appeals court decision this year that revived aspects of Felicia Sonmez’s suit against the Washington Post. 

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