Digby has a useful response to those who treat the ideal of journalistic objectivity as a timeless phenomenon:
journalism reacted strongly to the new field of public relations in the 20’s and 30’s by developing this professional code of objectivity quite a while before the cold war. However, there is no doubt that there was a general disgust at the propaganda of both the fascist movement in Europe and the Soviet regime that propelled this new fetish for objectivity in the American press into the cold war consensus. And certainly our current lame definition of objectivity as “he said/she said” is thoroughly modern.
But what about the current “he said/she said” version of objectivity? Does it not have larger historical causes? I have a hypothesis: the ending of the FCC Fairness Doctrine during the Reagan administration, though it dealt merely with television and in practice didn’t initially change the way network news worked at first, caused a shift in the whole journalistic field. The ideology of liberal consensus (to use Godfrey Hodgson’s useful term) was remarkably stable throughout the postwar years and extended over most of the political spectrum. Politically, of course, the New Right and the Reagan Revolution broke the consensus, and as much as the Fairness Doctrine flowed from anti-regulatory politics, it also reflected a longstanding dissatisfaction a media universe in which the center held. For the journalists, the Fairness Doctrine was a signal that partisan and particularist challenges would increasingly come to their work - if Rupert Murdoch didn’t exist someone would have had to invent him - and thus reacted by entrenching themselves further in the ideal of objectivity. It became a distinction against the way that maverick journalists (John Stossel?) worked. As more partisan media entered print and the airwaves in the 1990s, this form of objectivity took particularly strident forms that showcased their objectivity to readers.
I don’t have a shred of evidence for this claim, but it would be an interesting one to pursue.
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