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

5. Balance: A “Slanderous and Nasty-Minded Mulattress,” Ida B. Wells, Confronts “Objectivity” in the 1890s

113 5 Balance A “Slanderous and Nasty-Minded Mulattress,” Ida B. Wells, Confronts “Objectivity” in the 1890s [Objective news] is the highest original moral concept ever developed in America and given to the world. —Kent Cooper, AP General Manager Objective journalism is a contradiction in terms. —Hunter Thompson Each chapter of this study covered an aspect of “objectivity”: detachment, nonpartisanship, the inverted pyramid writing style, and a reverence for facts and empiricism all evolved over the course of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, the period of this final chapter, all the elements covered so far came together; journalists and journalism were what the profession calls “objective.” Through an examination of the mainstream newspapers’ coverage of lynching1 and a critique of this coverage by Ida B. Wells, an antilynching crusader, this chapter reveals a fascinating historical moment in which racism and “objectivity” meet and clash; in so doing, the chapter examines the concept of “objectivity,” its construction, and how it can be compromised by racism and other factors. Even after the profession became “objective” it could not present a clear picture of lynching. In fact, “objectivity” helped to obscure an important piece of reality, the perceptions of Ida B. Wells and other African Americans. 114 | Balance “Objectivity” Comes of Age In the 1890s “objectivity” became codified as the great law of journalism. Most historians of journalism agree that fin de siècle newspapers were less partisan, less “biased,” more “independent,” and more “objective” than their antebellum counterparts. By 1880 directories listed a fourth of all U.S. newspapers as politically “independent”; by 1890 a full third would be classified as such.2 And nearly all the major newspapers of the major cities, especially those of the Northeast, regularly asserted their political independence . According to Willard G. Bleyer, an early twentieth-century press historian, antebellum “views-papers” were replaced by “news-papers.”3 According to two researchers, Harlan Stensaas and Donald Shaw, “objectivity ” rose while “bias” declined in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the decade after the Civil War only 40 percent of all surveyed stories were “objective,” wrote Stensaas;4 by the start of the new century “objective” stories comprised two-thirds of the total. With the rise of “objectivity ,” Stensaas argues, came a concomitant rise in the use of authoritative sources and the inverted pyramid form.5 Shaw found a decline in “bias” after 1872 and suggested that the decline was due in part to the rise of the telegraph and news wire services.6 My own research supports these claims. The personal, partisan, chronological, and religion-based articles of the early part of the century, as I have shown, were giving way to articles that contained the characteristics of “objectivity.” By the 1890s news and “editorial” had become two distinct forms of writing, and news writing was clearly dominant. Charles Dana, for example , used his editorials to smear President Grant in the 1870s, but instructed his news editors at the Sun to be strictly nonpartisan in their political coverage . The political voice of newspaper reporting was clearly on the wane, and by the late 1880s one editor who had begun his career with a strong political voice, Joseph Pulitzer, was even experimenting with doing away with editorials completely.7 The 1890s is a good place to end a history of “objectivity” because it is one of the first decades when “objectivity” was a recognized ethic in journalism , but also one of the last in which “objectivity” goes basically unquestioned . Michael Schudson addressed a number of factors, such as the First World War and the rise of public relations firms, that pushed journalists to question the idea of “objectivity” in the first half of the twentieth century.8 In the 1890s consciousness and clearheadedness had not yet been complicated by Freud, observation had not yet been problematized by Balance | 115 Einstein, and perspective had not been challenged by Picasso, as they all would be in the first years of the twentieth century. The first journalism textbook to challenge “objectivity,” with its pointed title, Interpretative Reporting , would not be written until 1938.9 Although the “and that’s the way it is” belief in “objectivity” still exists among many journalists, it may well have peaked as an ideal in the 1890s. The 1890s, therefore, can be described without much simplification as the first and last time that the ethic of “objectivity” existed...