Journalistic objectivity grants a false outsider status to reports created from inside conflicts

Evidence

Via impartiality, broadcasting is thus raised above the conflicts which it treats. It seems to stand outside the real play of interests on which it reports and comments. The men and women who produce programs are real social individuals in the midst of the conflicts which they report. But this “subjective” dimension is repressed in the “objectivity” of the program. The programs they produce are outside those conflicts—they reflect on and judge them, but they do not participate in them. As a recent pamphlet on Television and the State observes, “the identifications contained in programmes gain a mysterious validity as they are put forward as being the product of an analytical rationality from outside the society and separate from society and class conflict rather than as the product of a dialectic rationality which includes an understanding and knowledge of the involvements from where the ‘truth’ of the programme is created.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 869

Categorization

• XREF: The critique of ‘view from nowhere’ objectivity in journalism resonates with the Frankfurt School’s critique of neutral-seeming technical rationality. — connects to: Newspaper objectivity can be compromised by editorial sympathy for powerful figures — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 867; Partisan cable news abandoned objectivity to confirm viewer biases at the public’s expense — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 142; Equal-time objectivity norms create false equivalence on settled factual issues — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 158 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Hall inverts the commonsense assumption that impartiality is the cure for bias, showing it instead to be the mechanism that hides the reporter’s embedded position.