Does an objective press exist?

Or maybe the better question is, can it?

One common link I find between the press in London and the press back home is a political identity that's associated with each newspaper or television station. The only exception to this is perhaps the BBC, which is the strange and wonderful thing they refer to here as a quango. The BBC aside, some of these associations are more deserved than others, some are in spite of efforts by the publications to appear non-partisan, but nonetheless they exist.

Today in lecture we had a representative from the UK Press Complaints Commission (PCC). She took us through the PCC's Editor's Code of Practice, a.k.a. the journalist's handbook on how not to get fired. Very useful stuff :)

I was somewhat surprised to find that the first tenet of the code, Accuracy, contains this sub-clause:

iii) The Press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.


In other words, you're allowed to take sides, you just have to own up to it and keep it in the opinion pages.

This got me thinking--obviously press objectivity has been in serious doubt for some time, and it's always going to be a gray area, but how many of our news organizations (both in the U.S. and abroad) will own up to their particular slant? You can judge a paper by the candidates it endorses, but a paper can say it endorses them for the greater good of the people and not for towing a party line. Are those slants something these organizations are internally aware of, or an identity that really is projected upon them by the public?

Probably a mixture of both, but I can't help thinking that as soon as you attach a certain political label to a news network or paper, they are almost fiscally obligated to follow it.

In the age of the 24-hour cable news network and online newspapers grasping for just a few page clicks, if you don't have a specific niche audience, you die. It therefore makes sense to keep catering to the people who come to you expecting a certain line of commentary or way of presenting the news, because you still have employees to pay and advertisers to satisfy.

The easiest target for this line of thinking is of course, FOX news, but they are certainly not alone. Say what you will about their "fair and balanced" coverage, but what they are doing is making them money.

Then the question becomes whether you associate these political leanings with the opinions of an organization's employees and owners, or if you attribute it to the sum of its parts.

For example, Rupert Murdoch (owner of FOX, Sky News and several prominent global papers) publicly supported Barack Obama, but recently donated $1 million to the Republican party. Tit-for-tat, is that balanced?

Or, the more recent question has been whether journalists as individuals are allowed to have political preferences.

Keith Olbermann's imposed hiatus on Friday is just the latest in a run of journalists being reprimanded for their political associations, as the New York Times pointed out today. It seems that more and more journalists have recently suffered professionally for political affiliations.

Is that a bad thing? If you believe in a non-partisan news media, definitely not. But how long can the non-partisan media continue to exist?

People like to read and see things that re-affirm their mindset. That's why niche media seems to be more successful now than the major networks.

But as people seek websites and newspapers and cable news that present one side of the story, the path is cleared for extremism and ignorance. I'll be the first to admit that I don't really enjoy reading commentary from perspectives I don't agree with, and it's much harder for me to seek them out.

I do believe a fair and balanced press can exist, I'm just not sure it can compete.

One of our tutors told us that if we got into this business to give the people what we think they need instead of what they want, we should get out now. But ratings and readership indicate that maybe what many people want is an unbalanced press. As certain networks and publications become more and more partisan, the few objective outlets that exist continue to lose out.

And I can't help but think that the actual ones who lose out are the people.

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Disclaimer: This is just my opinion! If you totally disagree, leave a comment below and let's talk it out.