8/27/2018 Where the Truth Lies Volume 28 Numbers 1 & 2, 2018 Where the Truth Lies: Grappling with Falsehood and Objectivit y in the Trump Era Susan Keith Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA Leslie­Jean Thornton Arizona State University Phoenix, AZ, USA Abstract: In both the 2016 presidential campaign and the first eighteen months of the Trump Administration, U.S. journalists encountered a new iteration of an important and thorny issue of ethics and practice­based norms: How should they describe assertions from Donald J. Trump that appeared to run demonstrably counter to truth? In other words, should journalists call the president a liar? As Trump asserted, ignoring vote counts, that he had won a landslide victory and maintained, without citing evidence, that there had been widespread voter fraud, U.S. journalism found itself in the relatively rare position of knowing the truth but not always knowing what to do with it. This essay identifies four types of approaches news outlets used in response to this and other presidential statements that could be immediately shown to be counter­factual. Three approaches were found in news reports: “stenographic objectivity,” in which journalists simply reported what Trump asserted, with little further explanation; what we call “comparative objectivity,” in which Trump’s assertions were reported in conjunction with information challenging them; and what we call “interrogative objectivity,” in which journalists overtly questioned the truth of the assertions, making that questioning the point of the article. A fourth type of response, which we call “evaluative subjectivity,” appeared in opinion sections, but emphasized reporting techniques to cast the counter­factual statements as lies. During both the 2016 presidential campaign and the first eighteen months of the Trump Administration, U.S. journalists encountered an important and thorny issue of ethics and practice­based norms: How should they describe assertions from candidate/President Elect/President Donald J. Trump that appeared to run demonstrably counter to truth? As Trump asserted he had won a landslide election victory (Seipel, 2016), maintained there was widespread voter fraud (CNBC.com staff, 2016), asserted that the United States was the highest­taxed nation in the world (Drum, 2017), and made other unsupportable claims, U.S. journalism found itself in the relatively rare position of knowing the truth but not always knowing what to do with it. This essay argues that U.S. journalism utilized four types of responses: “stenographic objectivity,” in which news outlets simply repeated what Trump asserted, with little further explanation; “comparative objectivity,” in which journalists repeated Trump’s assertions in conjunction with information challenging them; “interrogative objectivity,” in which journalists overtly questioned the truth of the assertions, making the counterfactual nature of the statements the point of the report; and evaluative subjectivity, in which editorial writers and opinion sections labeled the statements “lies.” Those sections, traditionally the home of subjective work http://www.cios.org/www/ejc/sandbox/Keith%20and%20Thornton.html 1/14 8/27/2018 Where the Truth Lies for which reporting was not the dominant point, relied heavily on reporting techniques to be able to contextualize the statements as connected incidents, sometimes recurring or accumulating but always meaningful. The essay begins with a discussion of objectivity in U.S. journalism. Then it recounts examples of other moments in American history when journalism was faced with a choice about labeling a president or other political figure’s counterfactual words. Next, the essay lays out the central argument: that responses to Trump’s statements reveal various conceptions and degrees of objectivity and subjectivity at work in U.S. journalism. Finally, the essay makes suggestions for future research. This work is important because it sheds light on the range of U.S. journalism practices in what an increasing number of scholars and journalists have referred to—some admiringly and some with dismay—as a post­objectivity era (Barlow, 2012; Gabler, 2013; McNair, 2017; Mort, 2012/3; St. John & Johnson, 2012; Wallace, 2017; Warhover, 2017). It may be premature to suggest there has been so seismic a shift in journalists’ views about balance in reporting and writing that objectivity is firmly in the past. Both research and anecdotal reports have identified news media workers who are not prepared to abandon 20th­century professional norms (Been, 2018; Ruhs, 2016). However, enough questions have been raised by journalists and scholars since 2016 about the role of objectivity in U.S. news production (e.g., Craft, 2017; Wallace, 2017; Rutenberg, 2016)—Singer (2017) writes that newspapers now “explicitly label lies for what they are,” leaving “no doubt as to what conclusions should be drawn” (2017, pp. 320­21)—that it seems appropriate to examine the range of ways in which U.S. journalists have reacted to obviously counterfactual presidential claims. An established range, in turn, can facilitate observation (and tracking) of stability and change. Contextualizing Objectivity Scholars have long noted that a key difference between journalism in the United States and many other nations, including most European nations, is that U.S. journalism is more likely to enshrine objectivity—the norm of “reporting something called ‘news’ without commenting on it, slanting it, or shaping its formulation in any way” (Schudson, 2001, p. 150)—as either an attainable goal or a rarely met ideal of professional practice (Waisbord, 2009; Ward, 2006). But it wasn’t always so. Before the 20th century, partisan media were the norm in the United States. As Schudson (2001) writes: “As late as the l890s, when a standard Republican paper covered a presidential election, it not only deplored and derided Democratic candidates in editorials but often just neglected to mention them in the news. … And in the Democratic papers, of course, it was just the reverse” (p. 155). Connery (2011) notes a shift in journalism toward “realism” in the 19th century, and Ward (2006) cites the appearance of the word “objectivity” in a book about newswriting in 1911. However, the concept was not common in codes of ethics, proceedings of meetings of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, or early journalism textbooks before the 1920s (Streckfuss, 1990). Schudson (1978, 2001) and other scholars (Emery, Emery, & Roberts, 1997; Ward, 2006) attribute the rise of objectivity to a variety of factors, including a decline in the power of political parties, to which newspapers had been beholden; a reaction to excesses of press agentry; the invention of the telegraph, which encouraged inverted­pyramid style articles focused on facts; and a commercial impulse to sell to readers of all political persuasions. Also important was the influence of scientific naturalism, the idea that fact­ based investigations provided the best explanation for phenomena. Walter Lippmann (1919), a key popularizer of objectivity, wrote that “only the discipline of a modernized logic can open the door to reality” and called for reporters to use “a sense of evidence” (p. 783), focusing on objectivity not as an attribute of the journalist, but as a method that would produce good journalism. This connection to evidence­based practice has been largely lost, write Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007), with the result that “objectivity” now “is usually used to describe the very problem it was conceived to correct” (p. 6), the reporting of claims without significant investigation of their truth. In addition, Maras (2013) has noted, “objectivity” has become a multifaceted word, “articulated in a cluster of terms such as impartiality, neutrality, accuracy, fairness, honesty, commitment to the truth, depersonalization and balance” (p. 9). That Maras uses the term “commitment to truth,” rather than “truth,” is notable, as a devotion to objectivity can lead, Muñoz­Torres (2012) writes, to “a substantial confusion of objectivity with truth and of subjectivity with the lack of it” (p. 574). Political Deceit and the Media Perhaps the most famous U.S. example of this confusion comes from the Cold War era of the 1950s when some journalists uncritically published the charges of Republican U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin that various Americans were communists or communist sympathizers. Although news media outlets did not react uniformly to McCarthy’s assertions, some, especially the wire services, reported them without challenging their truthfulness (Bayley, 1981). Former International News Service reporter Charles Seib, who became the ombudsman for The Washington Post, told Bayley that McCarthy manipulated the work routines of wire­ service journalists, offering new assertions at times when editors were pressing for fresh rewrites for later news cycles: “We were trapped by our techniques. If he said it, we wrote it; the pressures were to deliver” (in Bayley, 1981). http://www.cios.org/www/ejc/sandbox/Keith%20and%20Thornton.html 2/14 8/27/2018 Where the Truth Lies In that case, the publication of news that was accurate (in that it quoted McCarthy’s assertions without errors about what he had said) but not truthful (because what he said lacked any basis in reality) was promoted by news routines. These are the “rules— mostly unwritten—that give the media worker guidance” on such questions as “What can or should be done? What will lead to criticism?” (Shoemaker