Never Neutral: The Myth of Objectivity
Who's ready for a bit of a rant? Well today it's time for one of mine that is old enough to drive. In journalism school I wrote a whole essay on how journalistic objectivity is unattainable, and I stand behind that idea all these years later. (Which, having reviewed a lot of the work from those years in search of that essay, can't be said for many of my youthful stances. So much cringe.)
Objectivity in communication is impossible, because we can never remove our perspective from the process. We are always bringing our own baggage, opinions, and ideas to the table. Everyone is shaped by their experiences, the media they consume, their values and myriad other factors, and this will always affect how we communicate.
Simply by deciding a story is worth telling—or not—we've introduced subjectivity. That's affected by the subjectivity that goes into deciding where to place a story, especially things like newsletters, magazines, and newspapers. Someone (or many someones) decides on the pull quotes, images to accompany a story, quotations from interview subjects, and formatting of the story. All of that is in turn affected by the subjective decisions about who to hire to make all those decisions. By the time a story is published, it’s covered in subjectivity.
The words we choose to tell a story will also keep it from every being truly objective. Yep, words still mean things—and sometimes the meaning is more subtle than we realize. When was the last time you saw a male politician called feisty or shrill? We see white suspects and criminals described in kinder terms than black victims. I've framed this whole post as a rant, not as an opinion or an essay; that word choice affects how you read the piece.
We can't forget our own bias and subjectivity that comes along for the ride when we consume media. It's entirely subjective when we decide whether or not a story is worth reading, and whether it's worth sharing with others. We decide what papers to read, what newsletters to sign up for, who we let into our social media feeds, all totally subjective decisions. These decisions may be carefully considered, but they are still subjective.
Communication—and journalism and art—is a two-way street. The creator is bringing their own subjectivity to the table, and so is the reader/watcher/listener/consumer. There's plenty to be said about making journalism and communication fair and balanced, and about our own responsibility to think critically about what we consume, but those are topics for another day with more brain power and space. They're on the list; I promise. But for right now, I’m focused on pointing out that objectivity in communication is impossible to achieve in practice. (Wikipedia even calls it a philosophical concept, folks.)
So once more for those in the back: Stop expecting your news, communication or, for the love of Pete, your social media feed to be objective. It's not. It never will be. Once we stop expecting that objectivity, the better we will get at telling good communication from the bad, seeing the goals that lay at the heart of that communication, and become better communicators ourselves.
