Objectivity and Ethics: Tips from Our Newsletter

 

October 13, 2022

Shout-out to Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias for capturing the shift in headlines and copy from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times below. Both stories refer to tweets Kanye West sent over the weekend which included the phrase, “when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”

In the first edition of the WSJ headline (below, top left) it read “Purported Anti-Semitic Tweet.” The second version dropped the word “purported.” The first version of the Times story (below, bottom left) remarked the tweets were “widely criticized as antisemitic.” That deck copy was later revised to “made antisemitic remarks…that were widely criticized.”

These may appear to be small differences of just a word or two, but they carry a lot of meaning. The first versions of both the WSJ and Times copy distance the reporter from the claim that the tweets were antisemitic and instead attribute that accusation to a vague third party. But West’s comments were extremely and clearly antisemitic; there is no other way they could be interpreted in good faith. Thus it’s important that news outlets make the claim as a matter of fact, without attributing it to others’ opinions. That’s why the better, updated versions of both stories (above, top and bottom right) remove that hedging language of “purported” and “widely criticized as.”

Related reading: for an examination of where news organizations are succeeding and failing at calling racist things racist, see this deep dive from Nieman Lab.

 

February 2, 2023

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a legislative plan Tuesday that, if taken up wholesale, will have a huge impact on the state’s higher education system. DeSantis, who is expected to run for president in 2024, wants to ban state colleges from hosting programs on diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory. (Reminder: CRT has gone from a term describing a legal theory not actually taught in U.S. grade schools to a euphemism for American history that acknowledges racism and slavery.)

This sounds very much like the desire for a memory hole where the country’s long history of racism and white supremacy is “disappeared” for the benefit of the white and powerful. The rewriting of history for political gain, banning education that would weaken white supremacy, suppression of the opposition … add to this Florida’s new censorship of school libraries and state “retraining” on book collection and it’s hard not to describe this series of moves as neo-fascist. That ideology, of course, relies heavily on tightly maintaining the education of its people in a way that serves its leaders. That education usually promotes a revisionist nationalism, often calling back to idealized “better” times and/or traditions.

The following statements came from DeSantis’s office Tuesday:

“… the legislation will ensure Florida’s public universities and colleges are grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization ….”

“In Florida, we will build off of our higher education reforms by aligning core curriculum to the values of liberty and the Western tradition ….”

And yet, headlines from major outlets announcing this news barely batted an eyelash. Some, like the New York Times headline below, felt the crux of the story is actually its impact on DeSantis’s political clout.

Not only does this wording dismiss very impactful policy as a savvy political move, but it sets up and normalizes conflict between DeSantis and the public education system. Calling it the “education establishment” — as if state government and public education don’t necessarily work in tandem — legitimizes this “culture war” and aligns itself with a populist ideology that rails against said “establishment.” The DeSantis office was probably high-fiving over this headline today.

Similarly, the headlines below support DeSantis’ point of view more than an “objective” journalist would expect. The first is a National Review headline run by Yahoo! which highlights the elimination of “bureaucracies,” language used by DeSantis and a common dog-whistle from the right as it denotes ineffective government spending. This headline fully buys into the premise that DEI initiatives are wastes of money.

The second, below, is from the Tampa Bay Times; a similar wording ran in Orlando’s Spectrum News 13. Both use “indoctrination” in quotes to imply the word came from DeSantis, not necessarily the newsroom. But since nothing about either headline seeks to interrogate the existence of actual indoctrination, we’re left to assume that it does actually exist. Unless, of course, the writers were attempting a bit of irony-via-scare-quotes. It wouldn’t be the first time, but it’s a cheap way of attempting to telegraph the truth without being married to it.

What would have been an appropriate headline to announce DeSantis’s intervention into higher education? The Associated Press, below, simply tells it like it is.

 

February 23, 2023

The Washington Post published the above headline earlier this week. The story describes how a lack of consistent data on police shootings makes it impossible to establish cause and effect. Reasonable enough. But the phrasing “nobody knows why” stopped me in my tracks. Well, I thought, that depends on what you mean by “knows.”

How do we know what we know? The field of epistemology (a very fun rabbit hole, if I may say so myself) seeks to understand this and to distinguish justified belief from opinion. Many arguments in journalism over objectivity boil down to this question: whose claims are evidence-based and whose are “biased?” In mainstream journalism, evidence is implicitly defined as empirical data or anecdotal data from those imbued with institutional expertise and authority. However, if you have data or expertise and you are particularly invested in a cause, that evidence might be dismissed as “advocacy.”

As the Post story explains, we don’t have empirical data that specifically links one cause to the rise in police killings across the country. But we do have data on the consequences faced by police involved in these killings (sometimes jail time, sometimes a raise) and data on how early police claims in these cases are often “misleading” (sometimes lacking detail, sometimes outright lies).

Other data we have includes:

• Police disproportionately kill Black people and 21% of all victims are in a mental illness crisis
• Trust in police has grown while trust in the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen
• White supremacist and militia groups have infiltrated U.S. police and law enforcement often fails to respond to racism in the ranks
• Police budgets have actually grown in many areas over the past few years
• Police unions work to obscure abuses of power and prevent reforms
• Training of U.S. police focuses on weapons, marksmanship, and a “warrior mentality” over de-escalation and communication

Again, we can’t use these data points to empirically point to what is driving this rise. But I think, as a society, we can put two and two together here. We can make some inferences about how police are trained, how they are shielded from accountability, and what ideologies shape them, and place that against the cultural background of polarization.

Does that constitute “knowing?” Clearly not in a way that meets the Post’s editorial standards. But it explains why a phrase like “nobody knows why” feels so jarring to those engaged with this news. Do we have no idea why this is happening, or do we have many ideas? Perhaps some trends are too complex for a data-based conclusion that fits a newspaper’s idea of evidence. Journalists need to figure out how to communicate this type of knowledge to their audiences.

Either way, a discussion on the rise in police killings doesn’t need to determine a cause. The headline from The Guardian, below, does this well.

 

March 23, 2023

“Just the facts” is a common newsroom refrain that’s supposed to encapsulate the gold standard of objectivity. Of course, the presentation of facts is vulnerable to human bias and true objectivity is impossible.

But another problem with the “just the facts” mentality is its abdication of responsibility for how audiences react to new stories. If they give “just facts,” the logic holds, then a news outlet isn’t at fault for any actions that result from their stories. All they did was present the cold, hard truth.

Which is why we still get an abundance of horse race journalism every election cycle. This, despite the fact that research has shown that news stories that predict candidates’ chances of winning can actually decrease voter turnout for the predicted winners.

And, I guess, why the headline below from the Hill amplifies Sen. Lindsay Graham’s prediction for how the American people would react to the potential indictment of former president Donald Trump. Graham may be stating his true belief, he may be making a statement he believes will serve him politically, or maybe a bit of both. But he’s not psychic.

We love taking credit for journalism’s immediate impact when it exposes corruption or rights a wrong. But what about the potential domino effects of repeating politicians’ opinions dressed up as fear-mongering predictions? The headline above makes it sound like an arrest of Trump would cause danger and unrest. And it might! But we don’t know that. Those aren’t facts.

The impact of amplifying Graham’s statement is impossible to know, but media effects research tells us making “predictions” in the news can influence human perception and behavior.

Journalists in the coming days should stick to what we do know will happen next, legally, like Time did in the headline below.

 

June 1, 2023

As part of the negotiations to lift the debt ceiling and avoid economic turmoil, U.S. House Republicans wanted to sweep away legal hurdles for the Mountain Valley Pipeline — and they got their wish. The fossil fuel project had been held up by court challenges due to its plans to cut through the Jefferson National Forest and hundreds of waterways and wetlands, NPR reports. The headlines below, from The Washington Post and The Guardian, refer to this surprise announcement.

Both of these headlines use a common tactic for reporting out the impact of a controversial policy from a “neutral” stance. Instead of simply describing that impact as factual — in this case, the impact is a significant threat to the environment, predicated on a long history of U.S. pipeline accidents that damage people, animals, and land — it is attributed to “critics” or “activists.” This framing turns the negative impact of such a policy into a matter of opinion rather than fact.

The attempt to be “objective” here is misplaced. Policymakers and activists may have different opinions on whether a policy should be made law due to its impact. But where that impact is observable and/or provable, its existence is not up for debate. In other words, it’s not just that “critics say” such a deal would imperil the environment — empirical fact and logic says it would. Whether that should stop such a deal from being made, however, would be a matter of opinion suitable for journalists to present via opposing viewpoints.

A fairer, more accurate headline would treat the risk this new pipeline poses to the environment as self-evident. The headline below from the Hill doesn’t quite get there, but it does at least point out that the deal makes this possible due to its changes to environmental law.

The example below, from Slate, is a bit better. It is a little too clever for my taste, but it does manage to get across the inconsistent message of the deal: the MVP has a greenlight, but last year’s climate and energy bill remains in tact.

 

June 22, 2023

Both the events of the Titanic submersible and the migrant boat which capsized last week leaving as many as 500 people missing were covered by many reporters around the world, and both deserved to be. However, I (and many others who consume media) noticed a huge discrepancy in how these events were covered — not necessarily in their language or framing, but in their proportionality.

Each newsroom has limited resources; the proportion dedicated to a story reveals the value that story holds in the newsroom. This might be true news value, but it also might be monetary value, because the two are inextricably if not explicitly linked. This value shows up both in the number of stories reported and the way they are promoted online, in print, and on social.

Today I want to point out what this looks like in practice through one of those avenues. Below are two screenshots of NYTimes.com, the New York Times’ homepage. The one on the left is from Tuesday, June 20 and displays a prominent package of six stories about the Titanic submersible. When I saw it, this was the third package from the top of the page, a valuable spot for capturing reader attention.

This made me curious about the “play” that the migrant ship story got when that news broke last week. I used the Wayback Machine to find screenshots of NYTimes.com from June 14 and 15 (hence the blank image placeholders); one of those is below, right. You’ll see one small headline about it in this section that was well down the page. Of the many captures I checked, this was the most attention it got in those first days.

On Wednesday June 21, NYTimes.com hosted another submersible-themed package (complete with a custom 3-D model of the vessel, presumably requiring more newsroom resources), this time in the second and third slots on the page (below, left). It also hosted a package on the migrant ship (below, right) for a brief period in the middle of the page — though, ironically the main story and image focused on the superyacht that saved some of the passengers.

I also checked CNN, the Washington Post, and a few other sites the same way. I can’t include them all here, but I found enough similarities to see a pattern of inequitable coverage between the two stories. I also searched Google News for search keywords about both stories. On Wednesday afternoon, Google retrieved 22,300 results for “migrant boat Greece” and 514,000 about “submersible.”

I don’t know why any of these editorial decisions were made and I can’t say I have complete knowledge of how stories were placed in their valuable real estate. But I do know that examples like these telegraph the perceived importance of a story to audiences, and this juxtaposition paints a damning picture of what is considered “newsworthy” to mainstream outlets.

 

November 30, 2023

Henry Kissinger died this week and, in turn, a flurry of obituaries and retrospectives were published by media outlets around the world. The headlines of these stories mark so wide a spectrum you’d be forgiven for wondering whether they’re all about the same man.

A sample from HuffPost, The Telegraph, USA Today, and the Washington Post, respectively:

What pieces of a long public life are newsrooms to amplify when such a figure dies? For starters, journalists should by no means extend the courtesy to not speak ill of the dead when recording the first draft of history. One could say, “give us just the facts,” but how the media chooses to present the facts in what limited space they have is the name of the game.

As former U.S. Secretary of State, Kissinger could objectively be labeled a diplomat or a statesman to level-set for unfamiliar audiences. The USA Today option above hits this neutral tone without opining on what “shape” that foreign policy took.

It is a fact that Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A reporter might justify its inclusion in the headline titling his obituary because it is indisputable and an award of import.

It is also a fact that Kissinger directed the secret bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country, at the end of the Vietnam War. Attacks on neutral states are considered war crimes. The full extent of this attack would not be revealed until years later, but it is estimated to have killed as many as 150,000.

This is just one of Kissinger’s many decisions that led to death and violence. As Rolling Stone’s obituary says, “Kissinger played a role in the deaths of so many different peoples that treating each with due consideration requires writing a book.”

Some outlets used words like “divisive,” “dominant,” or “polarizing,” to avoid appearing biased in their assessment of Kissinger’s legacy. If operating from a place of moral clarity and with the above facts in hand, however, newsrooms should feel confident in making the harms he inflicted the salient part of his legacy — and write their memorializing headlines accordingly.

 

February 22, 2024

Earlier this month Nex Benedict, a nonbinary 16-year-old from Oklahoma, died the day after they were beaten by classmates in a school bathroom. I use this phrasing based on an interview with Benedict’s mother at The Independent, who said “she was called to the school that day to find Nex badly beaten with bruises over their face and eyes” and that Benedict collapsed at home the next day before being rushed to the hospital where they were pronounced dead.

On Wednesday, local police released a statement which reads, in part,

“While the investigation continues into the altercation, preliminary information from the medical examiner’s office is that a complete autopsy was performed and indicated that the decedent did not die as a result of trauma.”

The Benedict family also released a statement, which reads, in part, “While various investigations are still pending, the facts currently known by the family, some of which have been released to the public, are troubling at best.”

The ultimate cause of Nex’s death is unclear at this point, but it is difficult to imagine it is wholly unrelated to the bathroom altercation. The headline above, from Them, does justice to this tragedy by connecting the dots without making unsubstantiated claims.

When details like these are both murky and highly consequential (as they are for the students involved in said altercation) it is crucial that journalists revisit how they typically choose whose voices are determinative and authoritative.

Reporters must place their decisions about whose testimony is given the benefit of the doubt against a backdrop that includes the following:

1) Oklahoma’s recent treatment of LGBTQ+ youth

For this context, I turn to the report from Them on Nex’s death:

“Sue Benedict told The Independent that other students started bullying Nex at the beginning of the 2023 school year. The Independent notes that in May 2022, a bill requiring public school students to use bathrooms that match the sex on their birth certificates became law in Oklahoma.

The LGBTQ+ advocacy group Freedom Oklahoma, as well as numerous progressive and LGBTQ+ media outlets … pointed out that Benedict’s death comes as Oklahoma’s head education official, state superintendent Ryan Walters, continues to embrace anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policy. In January, Walters pushed an emergency rule to prevent students from changing the gender listed on their school records. Last month, he also appointed Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the virulently anti-LGBTQ+ platform Libs of TikTok, to the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s advisory council overseeing the state’s school libraries, despite Raichik not even living in Oklahoma. Last year, a Tulsa elementary school received a bomb threat after Raichik shared a video with the name and school of a local librarian. In 2022, Raichik similarly targeted a teacher in Benedict’s school district for openly supporting LGBTQ+ students who weren’t accepted by their families. The teacher later resigned following harassment.”

2) Historic relations between police and LGBTQ+ communities

A brief set of relevant facts:

• As the Urban Institute wrote in 2020, “American sodomy laws and laws regulating gender presentation perpetuated LGBTQ oppression for decades. Throughout the 20th century, it was common for police across the country to infiltrate and attack queer community spaces and businesses.”
• According to a 2020 poll, “71% of LGBTQ+ people between the ages of 13 and 24 say that they trust the police ‘not too much’ or that they have no trust at all. That compares with just 25% of cisgender, white, straight, male respondents.”
• The Prison Policy Initiative reported in 2021 that LGBTQ+ people “are overrepresented at every stage of criminal justice system, starting with juvenile justice system involvement.”

3) Histories of inaccuracies or falsehoods in police statements

Many publications, from USA Today and CNN to The New York Times, The Grio and Salon, have reported on the dire consequences of false or incorrect police statements. Though historically treated as a neutral source that is accurate by default, police reports should be treated by journalists like any other source. Details should be corroborated and placed in context, not amplified as if they are inherently factual.

That’s why I have an issue with the headline above from Oklahoma’s News on 6. It leads with the quote from police about the unreleased autopsy and then lists both the Owasso police and Benedict’s family. This could easily be read as if the Benedicts are the source of — or at least are in agreement with — the initial quote, when the family’s statement actually implies the opposite.

I’m not suggesting that the police statement is inaccurate. I have no reason to believe it is. But when dealing with incomplete information, reporters should not amplify any one party as the impartial, objective, single source of truth above another until there is further clarity. Doing so risks biasing the public toward one telling of events before all of the details are known.

That’s why I prefer News Channel 8’s headline, above, which focuses on reactions to the statements without strongly preferencing any singular voice. Alternatively, the version from 2 News below highlights the police statement but clearly lays out the source of the information and qualifies it by calling the report “early findings.”

No matter what further details are revealed, Nex’s death is a tragedy. To honor their memory, journalists on the story must refrain from relying too fully on any one source to provide the facts and continue to investigate.