Newspaper objectivity can be compromised by editorial sympathy for powerful figures

Evidence

The support for Smith and Moses spilled off the editorial pages into the supposedly impartial news columns. The paper in which this tendency was most striking was the Times, both because the paper strove so diligently for objectivity on other issues and because of its reputation. (“The Times was the bible, emerging each morning with a view of life that thousands of readers accepted as reality,” its biographer, Gay Talese, was to write. “They accepted it on the simple theory that what appeared in the Times must be true.”) The slanting in the Times’s initial story on the Taylor Estate fight—the verbatim recitation of all Moses’ points and the burying of Macy’s—was not corrected in succeeding stories. Stories about court developments—which were unfavorable to Moses—were kept short and relegated to inside pages. Van Siclen’s flat statement that the appropriation was illegal and a violation of both law and the constitutions of the state and nation was on page twenty-one, and it was exactly five paragraphs long. More favorable stories on political developments were front-paged and allowed to run interminably. … The key contentions of Moses’ opponents were almost totally ignored. Only the most diligent readers of the Times could understand, for example, that the fact that Moses had appropriated the property without money to pay for it was of importance; the fact was hardly ever mentioned, and the mentions it was given were fleeting. When Ottinger revealed Moses’ $63,000 expenditures for “overhead,” the Times buried the story on an inside page and handled it this way: Albany—What is considered here as an attempt at retaliation by Republicans on Governor Smith for his veto of the Thayer State Park bill is contained in a letter of censure sent by Attorney General Ottinger to Robert Moses. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 867

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing scholarship on how reputational institutions (‘what appeared in the Times must be true’) manufacture consent — echoes Milgrom on reputation systems and the Champagne fairs, plus Hall on how supposedly neutral institutional frames carry political import. — connects to: Journalistic objectivity means facilitating truth, not equal time to falsehood — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 164; Journalistic objectivity grants a false outsider status to reports created from inside conflicts — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 869; Media reproduce dominant ideology through impartial professional norms rather than overt bias — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 920
• SEED: The ‘bible’ trust dynamic — how a reputation for objectivity itself becomes the mechanism that makes a paper’s actual slanting most dangerous — is a strong essay angle: objectivity as a liability precisely when it is most trusted.

Broader Connections

• Journalistic objectivity means facilitating truth, not equal time to falsehood #complicates (0.82) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 164
• Media reproduce dominant ideology through impartial professional norms rather than overt bias #expands (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 920
• Journalistic objectivity grants a false outsider status to reports created from inside conflicts #complicates (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 869