Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism - Softcover

Mindich, David T.Z.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081475614X ISBN 13: 9780814756140

Publisher: NYU Press, 2000

Synopsis

If American journalism were a religion, as it has been called, then its supreme deity would be "objectivity." The high priests of the profession worship the concept, while the iconoclasts of advocacy journalism, new journalism, and cyberjournalism consider objectivity a golden calf. Meanwhile, a groundswell of tabloids and talk shows and the increasing infringement of market concerns make a renewed discussion of the validity, possibility, and aim of objectivity a crucial pursuit. Despite its position as the orbital sun of journalistic ethics, objectivity-until now-has had no historian. David T. Z. Mindich reaches back to the nineteenth century to recover the lost history and meaning of this central tenet of American journalism. His book draws on high profile cases, showing the degree to which journalism and its evolving commitment to objectivity altered-and in some cases limited-the public's understanding of events and issues. Mindich devotes each chapter to a particular component of this ethic-detachment, nonpartisanship, the inverted pyramid style, facticity, and balance. Through this combination of history and cultural criticism, Mindich provides a profound meditation on the structure, promise, and limits of objectivity in the age of cybermedia.

About this title

Review:

"There is a growing unhappiness about the direction of news coverage. Readers and viewers want 'objectivity' back. The first step toward doing that is to understand where 'objective' journalism came from in the first place. Just the Facts is a good place to begin."

-Jonathan Alter, The Washington Monthly

"Superb. . . . Mindich links history to contemporary practice by examining the current debate about objectivity through his 100-year-old lens."

-Steve Weinberg, The Christian Science Monitor

"Few issues are as central to our understanding of journalism as the debate over objectivity. In this original and engaging book, David Mindich extends our understanding of it in many directions."

-Mitchell Stephens, author of A History of News

"Taking a fresh, panoramic view of objectivity, David Mindich improves our understanding of a key journalistic concept. This perceptive book offers both intriguing stories and a helpful historical framework for current debates on press performance."

-Jeffery Smith, University of Iowa

"Refreshing, imaginative and thoughtful, David Mindich here reveals intriguing pictures of America's past as he probes terrain generally obscured beneath unquestioned generalizations. He takes readers on a guided tour of nineteenth-century American culture and journalism as he explores changes in print news structure and presentation through a focus on reportage of major events and ideas across nearly seven decades."

-Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota

From the Author:

Review in the Christian Science Monitor
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1998

BOOKS, REVIEWS

Steve Weinberg

....David Mindich's Just the Facts is about journalism in the 19th century, not the end of the 20th century. Yet, coincidentally, it is a superb setup to... thoughts about the contemporary state of the craft. Mindich, a former Cable News Network editor turned professor at St. Michael's College, Colchester, Vt., explains - in approachable language too rarely used by academics - how a politically partisan press came to accept objectivity as its touchstone. It was a slow evolution. But by the 1890s, objectivity had become the goal at newspapers and magazines. Most journalists considered themselves not only politically nonpartisan, but also detached from society in general, empirically minded in their everyday lives and willing slaves to the fashionable inverted-pyramid style of writing that emphasized who, what, when, and where instead of why and how.

Objectivity spawned its own set of problems, including giving audiences two or more sides of a story even when the journalist knew at least one side deserved to be ignored. Mindich shows how objective journalism could not overcome certain deep-seated prejudices such as racism. Toward the end of his book, he includes a brilliant chapter on newspaper coverage of lynchings of African-Americans. It took Ida Wells, one of very few African-American woman in journalism at the time, to expose the lies embedded in the supposedly objective coverage of these murders.

Mindich links history to contemporary practice by examining the current debate about objectivity through his 100-year-old lens. As once-objective daily newspapers face decreasing circulation, general-interest magazines struggle to survive, and network news divisions lay off hundreds at a time, so-called new media, many of them decidedly anti-objectivity, are growing exponentially.

"With so many storytellers - each of the thousands of home pages, for example, is a separate news source - and with so many departing from the information model of objective news, journalists are called on once again to define themselves," Mindich says. "It is no surprise that the nature of news and objectivity should reemerge as an issue so important to the profession."

Mindich never idealizes objectivity, and rightly so. Yet, despite the problems it spawned, objectivity also led many journalists to act cautiously for fear of presenting unbalanced material to the public. Caution by journalists before publishing - no matter what their delivery medium - would be a welcome development.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 081475614X
• ISBN 13: 9780814756140
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200