If you think of the names that have created the biggest buzz in the media world in the past few years – blogger/journalist Glenn Greenwald, data guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, and now the increasingly popular lo-fi documentary makers at Vice News – they have one thing in common. These are story-tellers for a digital age that come less from the tradition of straight, impartial news gathering and instead embrace a new style of journalism which favours transparency, strong analysis, opinion, a subjective standpoint, and at times, flat-out advocacy for one side of a debate.
And with evidence suggesting younger audiences in particular are turned off by traditional news, do we really need impartiality anymore?
As far back as 2001, American media scholar John Pavlik wondered if, “by moving outside the ideology of objectivity, alternative news sources may help to put the facts into a more complete context and perspective. Perhaps society collectively will then be able to triangulate on the truth in a way that traditional journalism cannot, because of its objectivity ideology”. Even former BBC News boss Richard Sambrook has asked “does a neutral voice hold the same value today as it did a century ago? Is the emphasis on impartiality in news actually an impediment to a free market in ideas?”
Further, academics such as New York University’s Jay Rosen have criticized impartial journalism, saying it can lead to what he dubs “the view from nowhere”. He describes this as “a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position impartial.”
The proponents for a post-impartiality world argue that “transparency is the new objectivity”. Author David Weinberger coined the phrase in 2009, saying “transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.”
The digital era provides many great examples of such transparency in journalism. US site ProPublica built an impressive publicly searchable database of doctors which showed those who were being paid by pharmaceutical companies. The Dollars for Docs story included links to primary sources of information so audiences could clearly see how the data worked and where it came from. Hybrid sites such as Politico, Ezra Klein’s Vox and Silver’s FiveThirtyEight are publishing content with many of the same editorial standards upheld by legacy media, but they’re also being transparent when they cannot give a full picture or when information is rapidly shifting. They promote a “show your work” ethos as a way of building audience trust. This differs slightly from the methods of the ABC and the BBC, who generally garner trust through an impartial and independent approach which examines the facts and draws conclusions based on the weight of evidence.
Business site Quartz, a digital-only site owned by The Atlantic, is an example of a news outlet which publishes journalism that comes from a viewpoint, but only when based on evidence. Global editor Gideon Lichfield says “we’re different from your average daily newspaper in that we don’t do the neutral viewpoint, neutral voice type of journalism. We do stuff that’s opinionated and has a take. In that sense we’re similar to The Economist in that someone can take a position but be clear in its argument for it and show its facts.”
This, of course, is different to merely publishing opinion without evidence. The Australian Press Council has reflected this in their newly released standards, which ask newspapers to ensure “writers’ expressions of opinion are not based on significantly inaccurate factual material or omission of key facts”.
But journalists must still tread with caution here. Transparency alone is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Tom Kent of Associated Press has wisely warned against discarding impartiality as “easy roadkill in the rush to new journalism techniques”. Transparency must still be coupled with the hallmarks of solid journalism: checking facts, attributing accurately, uncovering new information, and exposing falsehoods.
Transparency also relies on the audience to actively engage rather than passively consume, thereby transferring some of the responsibility for seeking out alternatives to the audience. US-based media ethicist Stephen Ward says “this new ethics of transparency... assumes that news consumers are media-savvy and it moves some of the burden of responsibility away from the journalist to the audience”. Audiences still rely on journalists to distill complex facts, filter through information to pull out the important aspects, and to contract lengthy arguments into consumable stories. As Kent argued in the Huffington Post, “try following links to a reporter’s mission statement when you’re listening to news in the car”.
Of course, it’s possible these two approaches to journalism can and should co-exist. It shouldn’t be a zero-sum game where one approach wins out over the other. It should be possible to write a piece from a viewpoint, if it is based on evidence. And it should equally be possible to write a passionate piece of journalism that is impartial where the audience is left to draw its own conclusions.
What has changed in the digital era is not so much the need for impartiality but the method to achieve it. New media prefer transparency and plurality to achieve impartiality, old media achieve it with objective methods. Let’s acknowledge that both methods can lead to quality journalism, or for that matter, to poor journalism.
But it’s also important to recognise what hasn’t changed. Audiences now have access to more information and a variety of different perspectives to form their own conclusions. Do audiences need a journalist to de-code the news or contextualise the facts anymore? I think they still do. This is what hasn’t changed.
In fact audiences need this more than ever in the internet age. News consumers are best served when the media provides them reliable information without spin and distills it into a digestible form. After all, there’s only 24 hours in a day. Presumably most people are too busy with work and the school run, to conduct their own robust investigations.
Maybe what we do need to recognise is that a third form of publishing is emerging. In the Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher asks “as the lines between old and new increasingly blur, are the two schools of journalism’s core values blending into a hybrid?”
I think they are, and outlets like Quartz, Vice News, and Vox are showing us just that. Let’s bring together the best elements of these two approaches to journalism so that the audience wins out. And let’s keep the advocacy journalism and the Twitter rants to a minimum. It’s what the audience, and the digital era, deserves.
Kellie Riordan is a 2014 fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Her paper is titled Accuracy, independence, and impartiality: How legacy media and digital natives approach standards in the digital age