This is a timely and important article, and it drove me absolutely crazy. Before I quote anything, I think I need to do some conceptual prep work. The problem, you see, is that the article suffers from a fatal fault—in calling out a false notion of objectivity, it leaves unquestioned its right to be framed as "objectivity". Look, I know I might sound ridiculous, but goddamn it, ideas matter. It's not so much a problem because that false objectivity is bad per se (though it is); it's a problem because a better alternative exists and I think getting it right is really, really important.
Science is not what, but how
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool."
–Richard Feynman
Human brains have all sorts of shortcuts for finding patterns. It's our greatest talent, and it's what's behind the best of us. Here are some ways to conceive of various shortcuts for finding patterns: jumping to a conclusion; conceptual leaps, both the creative parallel kind and the brilliant insight kind; optical illusions; artistic license; intuition; suspicions; logical fallacies; madness.
Basically every social interaction we have, every use of language, is running on hardware that, when you get down to it, is just doing a bunch of sloppy pattern matching[^1]. And we're ridiculously good at it! It has literally taken us to the moon. But if jumping to conclusions is fundamental to being an alive human, it means we're never going to not be wrong about some stuff. You, me, Einstein, Pedro Martinez, Aristotle, Lupita Nyong'o: everyone who ever has or will live is wrong about a ton of shit.
This is almost all you need to acquire a deep understanding of science. The other part is a way out: using statistics and measurements of the actual world to verify stuff. Human perception isn't perfect, but it's still pretty good, and the physical universe makes sense. You take your flawed conceptions as a starting point, and you see which ones you can try to disprove. I say "try", because a lot of times, you can't even do that: the world is full of questions that have a single true, reality-based answer that there's no way to find out. Got to hope there's Wikipedia in Heaven. But sometimes you CAN check. So you do.
Here's the last catch: you can't really prove anything is true, but sometimes, when the facts cooperate, you can prove things false. So you try to prove everything you believe to be true to be false. Occasionally, to your chagrin, you will be successful. And for centuries, this has been the method of human progress: shuffling painfully towards the truth by discarding convincing bullshit one piece at a time.
That's the whole trick. That's how we got spaceships and vaccines. Until you go measure the real world, everybody's words are just words, and, as previously discussed, we are all wrong about a lot of things. Shit, we didn't even need to bring up intentional lying or willful ignorance: even if everyone is trying their very best, people alone can't be relied on for truth. No folk tradition managed to invent antibiotics, you know?
What that article means when it says "objectivity"
Defining "objectivity" in terms of empirical truth, the following paragraph becomes absurd:
Is it the media’s responsibility to cover groups or persons who purposefully use hateful and provocative speech as a means to gain attention? In what way should this coverage manifest? And, perhaps most importantly—at what point are journalists obligated to repudiate notions of objectivity for the sake of humanity and morality?
Humanity and morality are, in general, best served by dilligent, unassuming respect for empirical truth. Furthermore, whether a thing is true or false has little to do with whether it's good or bad[^2], and vice versa.
The most frustrating part of writing this is that I haven't found a way not to come down too harshly. The article is talking about the same problem I am, and in many ways it's doing quite a good job of it. While it doesn't properly name the concept it targets, it pins it down precisely through a series of incisive and well-sourced takedowns of media uncritically airing people who are demonstrably in the wrong:
The Milo profile was far from the first time that an outlet has, I’d argue, favored an obscure notion of objectivity over the protection of human rights and civil liberties. In May, USA Today printed an op-ed written by the president of the American Family Association (AFA), Tim Wildmon, urging readers to boycott the discount retailer Target due to their inclusive bathroom policy. USA Today neglected to inform its readers that AFA is an anti-LGBT hate group, while also providing a space for Wildmon to perpetuate the “bathroom predator” myth. Not only has this virulent lie been disproven, its infectious reach has had a documented impact on the psychological and physical safety of the transgender community.
The problem is that that "obscure notion of objectivity" is neither obscure nor, I would argue, objectivity. I suspect, if asked to define "media objectivity", a lot of Americans would sketch out a concept similar to this: an objective media does not try to shape events, it merely reports on them. I suspect FAR more strongly that this is how the American media itself sees its mission. If the pitfall to be avoided is a thumb on the scales, then you're at the mercy of the existing terms of debate; which is at the mercy of what humans believe; which, c'mon, we've been over that already. Like 400 years ago already. But for all the "obscure notion" shade it's trying to throw, the article doesn't challenge that as the framework for judging "objectivity". And as long as that's in place, journalists either have to err on the side of not being to critical or they need to get rid of "objectivity" as the primary standard. And that's hogwash.
Why that's a problem
That definition needs to be demoted to the second concern: the primary metric by which the media's objectivity should be measured is integrity with objective reality as best we can measure it. Often that means statistics. It means fact-checking is not a "nice-to-have", it is fundamental to the whole operation. Really, it means doing some fucking reporting.
The article quotes Lisa Wade, a sociology professor at Occidental:
“Each time we see a black person on TV who is linked with a violent crime or portrayed as a criminal, the neurons in our brain that link blackness with criminality fire. The more often a link is triggered, the stronger it becomes. Disproportionate reporting . . . make the neural links in our brain—its actual physical structure—reflect the racism inherent in the reporting itself.”
The argument, which I find quite compelling, is that repeating socially-backed but damaging, false, or repugnant rhetoric, ESPECIALLY uncritically, reinforces it in the audience's minds, corroding truth and/or the common good. But that logic seems awfully open to extension: repeating this implicit notion that objective balance in a conflict is primarily determined by the social force of one or another "side", rather than by its verifiable truth[^3] literally builds that link in readers' minds. People use words the same way the folks around them do: for the sake of the people around us, America has to step up at using them in service of truth.
[^1]:
European philosophy has spent lifetimes failing to get around this fact, which is why it is so beautiful and so tedious.
[^2]:
The most pernicious form this takes is "we can't change $THING because
that's just the way things are". Beyond the surface-level problem of
squelching analysis of $THING in good/bad terms because of a tautological
assertion of its truth value, it nihilistically sweeps away any reasonable
question of the upside risk of attempting to change $THING and it's
almost always wrong, historically speaking.
[^3]: It is always both, of course, for we are awash in a sea of opinions.