are journalist being objective

TITLE PAGE

The title of this report is as follows :
Are Journalists Objective In Their Thinking ??

Author’s:
Amrita H
Rhea Suzanne Alex
Sanaa Parpia
Sherly Sanjana
Sonali R

Department Of Journalism , MOP Vaishnav College For Women

Under the supervision of Ms.VidyaPadmanabhan

Year (2014 – 15)

Acknowledgement:
We owe our profound gratitude to all those who have helped and supported us during the project.

My deepest thanks to Dr.Lalitha Balakrishnan,Principal of MOP Vaishnav college for women,Chennai for extending her support.

We heartily thank our Head Of The Department Dr.Sandhya Rajasekhar for her gidence and encouragement during this project work.

We respect and thank our faculty Ms.Vidhya Padmanabhan for providing us with an oppourtunity to do the project work and for suggesting and helping us to sucessfully complete the project.

We would also like to thank the subjects who patiently filled up the questionaire for our project.

INTRODUCTION

Journalistic objectivity is a significant principle of journalistic professionalism. This topic deals with the fairness, dis-interestedness,factuality& nonpartisanship of journalists, but most often, it encompasses all of these qualities. A debate has been raging for 50 years or more as to whether journalists should be objective in their thinking or not? The main aim of this report is to take into consideration the views of the general public on the above issue, assimilate them and come to a realistic conclusion.

Research

We hear it all the time that reporters should be objective and fair. Some news organizations even use these terms in their slogans, claim that they are more “fair and balanced” than their competitors. But what is objectivity and what does it mean to be fair and balanced?

Objectivity

Objectivity means that when covering hard news, reporters don’t convey their own feelings, biases or prejudices in their stories. They accomplish this by writing stories using a language that is neutral and avoids characterizing people or institutions in ways good or bad. Objectivity is a standard that requires journalists to try to put aside emotions and prejudices, including those implanted by the spinners and manipulators who meet them at every turn, as they gather and present the facts.

Fairness

Fairness means that reporters covering a story must remember there are usually two sides to most issues and that those differing viewpoints should be given roughly equal space in any news story.
Let’s say the local school board is holding a public forum examining whether to ban certain books from the school libraries. Many people from the community are in attendance, and there are citizens representing both sides of the issue.
The reporter covering that event may have strong feelings about the subject. But regardless of his feelings, he should interview both those citizens who support the ban, and those who oppose it. And when he writes his story, he should convey both arguments in a neutral language, giving both sides roughly equal space in his story.

A Reporter’s Conduct

Objectivity and fairness apply not only to how a reporter writes about an issue, but also to how he conducts himself in public. That means a reporter must not only be objective and fair but also convey an image of being objective and fair.
Let’s go back to that school board forum. The reporter may do his level best to interview people from both sides of the argument, but if in the middle of the meeting, he stands up and starts spouting his own opinions on the book ban,then his credibility is shattered. No one will believe he can be fair and objective once they know where he stands on the issue.

A Few Caveats

There are a few caveats to remember when considering objectivity and fairness:

First, such rules apply to reporters covering so-called hard news or straight news stories, for the main news section of the newspaper or website. Obviously they don’t apply to the political columnist writing for the op-ed page or to the movie critic working for the arts section, both of whom make a living giving their opinions on a daily basis.

Second, remember that ultimately, reporters are in search of the truth. And while objectivity and fairness are important, a reporter shouldn’t let them get in the way of finding the truth.

Objectivity and the decades-long shift from “just the facts” to “what does it mean?”

As stories have shifted from facts to interpretation, journalists are increasingly in the business of supplying meaning and narrative. It no longer makes sense to say that the press only publishes facts.

New research shows this change very clearly. In 1955, stories about events outnumbered other types of front page stories nearly 9 to 1. Now, about half of all stories are something else.This is a report that explains why and not just what.

This chart is from a paper by Katharine Fink and Michael Schudson of Columbia University, which calls these types of stories “contextual journalism.” (The paper includes an extensive and readable history of all sorts of changes in journalism in the 20th century).The authors sampled frontpage articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in five different years from 1955 to 2003 and hand coded each of the 1891 stories into one of four categories:

Conventional:
A simple report of an event which happened in the last 24 hours Contextual: A story containing significantinterpretation, analysis or explanation

Investigative:
Extensive accountability or “watchdog” reporting

Social Empathy:
A story about the lives of people unfamiliar to the reader

Conclusion

Thus, Journalism is factual reports of current events. In other words, use objectivity and fairness as tools to find the truth. The pursuit of objectivity is what separates us from our audience and from pseudo journalists. Rather than cower to those who would use objectivity as a cudgel against us, we should reclaim it, use it, and reveal how we pursue it. More importantly for the future, we should teach it. That’s your goal as reporters.

Lastly, review of literature is also important to highlight difference in opinions, contradictory findings or evidence, and the different explanations given for their conclusions and differences by different authors. In some cases, an analysis of these factors can help one understand may facets of a complex issue and at other times, such analysis can lead to a new possibility that can be researched upon in the current project. Thus review of literature is a very important part of one's research.
To summarise, there is hardly any research project which is totally unrelated with research that has already taken place. Usually every individual research project only adds to the plethora of evidence on a particular issue. Unless the existing work, conclusions and controversies are properly brought about, most research work work would not appear relevant, not will it appear important in the whole framework. Thus, review of literature is a very important aspect of any research both for planning your work as well as to show its relevance and significance.

Opinion Journalism vs. Objective News Reporting
BY PATRICK MAINES ON AUGUST 15, 2013POSTED IN MEDIA CRITICISM

The rise of opinion journalism, not just among cable and the newer media but elements of the legacy media as well, magnifies the problem of the dearth of objective news reporting. About five years ago even the Associated Press announced a turn toward opinion, euphemistically referred to as “accountability journalism,” while the Washington Post and the New York Times have for years now been foundering in the stuff.
Makes one wonder where to turn (outside, perhaps, of the business and financial journals) for investigative and feature news that is not in service to some political party, ideology, or special interest.
And what a loss! At the very moment that this country desperately needs an independent, credible, and objective press to describe and chronicle the country’s manifest economic problems, there’s practically nobody in the Fourth Estate who commands widespread trust and respect.
For all the talk about the new media, much of it online, is there anyone so credulous as to believe they’re getting unvarnished facts in a “news report” published by such as Slate, Salon, or the Huffington Post? Or, at the other extreme, by Breitbart, Drudge, or Newsmax?
Nor is there any relief to be found in the product offered up by outlets like Politico, an online journal that has never spotted an issue of such gravity it can’t be covered by resort to rumor, superficiality, and the banalities of horse race journalism.
The complete failure of the media to adequately explain complex policy issues first became unavoidably clear during the presidential election of 2008 when, despite the obvious nature of our economic distress at the time, the media demanded precisely nothing of substance on the subject from McCain or Obama.
This failure has also been a persistent feature of the coverage since of the Affordable Care Act, sequestration, the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing,” and unemployment. A recent headline from Mediaite, summarizing a new Pew poll, put it this way: “Biased, Frivolous, And Liberal: Poll Shows Most Americans Still Distrust The Media.”
A number of academics have aided and abetted the collapse of objectivity as a journalistic standard, premising their arguments on the sophomoric notion that objectivity isn’t attainable. Of course it isn’t attainable if there’s no interest in attaining it, but it’s not like objectivity is a Zen koan or some such. What’s required is editors who are smarter and tougher and more fair-minded than the reporters who work for them, and owners who care about the editorial product itself and not just the ads the editorial product attracts.
The need for objective news reporting grows in proportion to the number and kinds of societal problems, especially those with an important economic element. Take, for instance, the recent scandals centering on the actions of the IRS.
For most political reporters, and most politicians, the targeting of conservatives by that agency is only of real importance if it can be shown that the president or senior administration officials ordered it. But that’s just exactly backwards. The targeting is vastly worse if there was no Administration input; if, instead, these were just the acts of a politicized bureaucracy.
Indeed, the accuracy and value-free qualities of government data collection and government-supplied information are indispensable to this or any well functioning democracy. Whole markets, after all (not to mention laws and regulations) turn on the truthfulness and clarity of data such as that supplied every month by the Commerce and Labor departments.
A story posted on Aug.11, by Bloomberg reporter Jonathan Weil, adds a wrinkle to the subject. According to Weil, the Justice Department admitted to having grossly overstated the number of mortgage fraud cases the department had filed as part of a multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group. Weil characterizes the false numbers originally given out as appearing to have been “willfully filed,” and only belatedly corrected because of the pressure put on by some other Bloomberg reporters.
In the larger scheme of things, this particular example of governmental malfeasance is probably not going to bring down the Republic, but the point of it all is to say that if the nation’s news media were to multiply Bloomberg’s reportorial effort by, say, a hundred (or a thousand) additional examples, the media might resurrect their own faltering reputations, and help sustain our democracy in the process.

The Next Journalism’s Objective Reporting
By Philip Meyer
Listen up, young journalists. Here’s some bad news from an old-timer: The economic basis for the detached, aloof-observer model of journalism that my generation built is crumbling fast.

The good news: You get to invent the next journalism.

The old system worked because print and broadcast journalism were naturally monopolistic. Broadcasting had a limited number of channels, and printing required expensive machines that broke easily. It wasn’t efficient to have more than a very limited number of them per market. That constraint produced a system geared to sending a few messages to lots of people.

Now, because of technology, the massiveness of the mass media is disappearing. We’re moving toward a system of many messages, each directed to a comparatively few people, and the new system is experimenting with different ways to do that. As markets will, it is trying the cheap ways first. Taking obvious facts and fitting them into a preconceived theory favored by the target segment is one way. It’s all the explanation we need for the success of right-wing talk radio.

Competition and entrepreneurial spirit will lead to other ways to profit from media specialization. Out of experimentation will come a new journalism that is at the same time better and worse than the old. One benefit is that the motivations of senders will become more transparent as each seeks to woo and win a viable segment of the audience.

There will still be an economic need for objective reporting, but it will have to be based on true objectivity, not the fake kind that the old mass media system supported. In that system, the appearance of objectivity was maintained by a sprinkling policy. Ink and airtime were scarce goods and so owners put a little here, a little there, trying to give all sides at least a chance for exposure to the mass audience. Journalists had viewpoints, but they kept them well concealed so as not to undermine the perception of neutrality.

But it was always a false perception. Journalists have opinions. The old media economics compelled their concealment so their messages could be sold to a broader range of end users. However, the end of pseudo-objectivity does not undermine the need for true objectivity. If anything, it enhances it. As the venues for spin and advocacy multiply, there ought to be a market for a trusted, objective source in the original, scientific sense.

True objectivity is based on method, not result. Instead of implying that there is an equal amount of weight to be accorded every side, the objective investigator makes an effort to evaluate the competing viewpoints. The methods of investigation keep the reporter from being misled by his or her own desires and prejudices.

When I was a member of the 1967 Nieman class, I studied social science research methods. And I saw clearly, for the first time, how science and journalism have the same goals and could use the same tools. Six years later, I got that notion into print with the first edition of “Precision Journalism.” In the opening chapter, I laid out the theory. To report on our complicated world, journalism requires interpretation as well as the straightforward reporting of facts. But the leap from observation to interpretation needs to be subject to the same kind of discipline as science.

Two aspects of what I advocated then caught on quickly: news media took responsibility for their own polling instead of relying on national syndicates or the polls of politicians. And journalists started discovering the power of computers to manage and interpret large quantities of data. But the discipline of scientific method with its rules for analysis and hypothesis testing never fully caught on, although there are some brilliant exceptions. Bill Bishop of the Austin American-Statesman and Steve Suo of The Oregonian in Portland are setting fine examples, and their editors deserve credit for giving them the resources to do it.

The trouble with this kind of journalism is that it is expensive, time consuming, and requires a level of skill not much in demand from a system that conceives of news media as mere platforms for attracting eyeballs to ads. That model puts a premium on low-cost attractants.

But, sooner or later, publishers will learn that to stand out in the noisy buzz of the information marketplace, they will need more trustworthy products. Journalism that yields reproducible results, reviewable by peers, open about its sources and methods, stands to find a privileged place in this new marketplace. You can be its creators.

Philip Meyer, a 1967 Nieman Fellow, is Knight Chair in Journalism professor at the University of North Carolina and author of “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” University of Missouri Press, November 2004.

Objectivity in Journalism: Is it Even Possible? Dave Barry once said, “We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.”

Journalism has always been expected to be an unbiased and objective way of stating the news. It allows for reporters to investigate a situation, gather all the facts, and then write a story lacking an opinion and being credited to everyone except themselves. With all the controversial topics being discussed in magazines and newspapers worldwide, is it even possible to be unbiased? How can one be able to sit and write an article about a recent law being put into effect and not in any way come up with an approving or disapproving tone? With all the influence from companies, writers, religion, and other social and political propaganda in the world, it is impossible for a journalist to be able to write a completely unbiased article. There are many different perspectives of what journalism is and what it can be. “Journalism at its best, is one of the arts of democracy. Journalists provide the news and analysis by which a society communicates with itself, allowing it some measure of self-government” (Ward 9). This is the ideal outlook of journalism. This is the outlook of journalism that holds news coverage in a light of complete truth and perfect ethics. It holds the idea that fact is being written and not opinion. The opposite of this opinion is that, “Journalism at its worst, is an art of the demagogue and the despot. It is the propaganda tool of powerful interests that subvert popular self-governance by manipulating the channels of information” (Ward 10). This is the opinion of journalism that is the majority of the outlook today. Many readers are starting to take notice that in a news article there are many biased and opinionated pieces of information. The major industry that was once held to such high standards of writing is now becoming known for what newspapers have what political viewpoints. While conservatives choose to read the Orange County Register and liberals tend to read the Los Angeles Times, which newspaper you read is now becoming a controversy. News writing for journalism is supposed to be just that. News writing. It is supposed to consist of the facts of the news and what actually happened based on reports of the people who were there or studies released by credited organizations. However, now news writing has even come to poses qualities that slightly hint at what the writer believes to be right and wrong in a story. In a society where the economy is a disaster and print papers and magazines depend on their advertisements, where politics are such a controversy that everyone feels their opinion needs to be heard, and where readers thrive on cut throat stories, writing a completely unbiased story is impossible. Being completely unbiased is impossible for a reporter to accomplish in every article that she or he writes. In fact, heavily subjective and opinionated articles are what sell papers these days. Scandals and other dangerous and questionable ethics is what readers want to read about. In this day in age since communication is possible with the press of a button from anywhere in the world, “You cannot be objective because you’re going to go in with certain biases…but you can certainly pursue accuracy and fairness and the truth” (Kovach 37). There are many factors that stop a reporter or journalist from being unbiased. When conducting research for a story, “Journalists turn to PR contacts for information and sources concerning such arenas as the marketplace, education, health, and entertainment. Accordingly, space-seeking propaganda has only grown and has developed into a sophisticated and established communication dynamic” (St. John III). The idea that journalists have to write to appease their advertisers is one of the main dilemmas facing news writing today. If a story is uncovered but makes a main advertiser look bad, then most editors will say that the story cannot be published. This is hiding the news from readers and also causing bias in a story. The types of stories that are the most popular these days involve conflict or some type of extreme action that gets everyone talking. Hard news is what the public wants to read about. Soft news is slowly becoming a thing of the past. With this in mind most journalists are starting to write stories that have a better chance of being argued with. This caused more people to write in about the story and then ends with more people actually reading it. In order to write a really controversial story that makes people argue about it, the story has to be written in a biased way otherwise it would appease everyone and there would not be as much commotion. This is what makes writing unbiased impossible.
Since being unbiased is impossible due to influences from all different aspects of society, a journalist certainly has to try to create accuracy when writing an article. In order to create accuracy, the outlook is that the journalist interview main eye witnesses and people directly involved with the story. They must conduct interviews to get to the root of the situation to be able to report on what really happened. All of the research that reporters conduct goes into a story to allow it to be true. This view of truth is simply based on the idea that what an interviewee is saying is truthful. Who then decided is what is being said is truthful? After all, “What is fair to one group will seem like bias to another” (Meyer 47). This idea of mere interviewing does not necessarily mean that what is accounted is truth. In fact, the interviewee has a bias. Through this view, no one can be unbiased because every view is biased to someone else. Every interviewee has a different biased, which will bring out different truth, which then leads a journalist to have many different views of truth in one article. In this way, it is then not important to look at how to make an article or story unbiased, but how to make an article or story more fair. Objectivity in journalism now becomes fairness.
In order to be fair in journalism and to attempt to be objective, steps need to be taken when writing a story. The main thing to make sure of when writing for journalism, is to make sure that “the news, and news media, be multiperspectival presenting and representing as many perspectives as possible” (Cohen 205). By representing all sides of the story equally the opinion on the journalists will be hidden among other similar opinions and not stand out to the reader. Many readers find this hard to read because “sourcing can clutter up a story, break its rhythm, slow it down” (Meyer 50). Though this happens, sourcing is that only way that a journalist can prove that he or she is not printing an opinion piece as a news article. So even though all the different views points can tend to make the story drag, it is better than losing credibility as a writer for only writing articles that convey your view point. Another step that has to be taken to insure accuracy in an article is to go through a verification process with each publication. Each publication needs to fact check all of the pieces of information about an accident or news report. They need to see the original documentation and call of the sources to make sure their statement is correct. They also need to look at the notes a journalist took while conducting these interviews so that they can be sure of all the things that are stated as fact. While also fact checking, the editor needs to also be looking out for any statements that can be classified as opinion. It is the reporter’s job to state what happened, not interpret it. It is the editor’s job to edit interpretations out of the story. This is all important because, “in the end, the discipline of verification is what separated journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art…journalism alone is focused first on getting what happened down right” (Kovach 71). Through these steps, a bias cannot be completely ruled out due to tone and mood that automatically is placed into writing based on who is writing the story; however, it will certainly help to even out the bias.
Journalism is perceived as being a publishing business that is meant to only deliver the complete and honest truth. However, with the way society is changing this is becoming more and more difficult for a journalist to accomplish. Due to influences all around society, a reporter cannot completely be unbiased because they must sway to the direction their editors find accepting in order to appease the advertisers. The temptation of selling more papers and gaining more readers by writing more controversial pieces is greatly influencing this as well. In order to maintain credibility as a writer, however, all sides of a story must be represented and editors need to do their jobs and edit to bias instead of encouraging it.

Methodology:
Jawarharlal Nehru had said that media is the watchdog of democracy.

The question that arises is that if they are carrying out their work with objectivity.

In media,it is necessary that journalists are not biased because they shape the public opinion.

Significance of the study:
While a few media houses are private ,there are some which are controlled by the government.

As a result a few journalists may not be given freedom to express to the public and may be subject to bias.

This opinion poll wil be useful to know what the general public feels about journalists.

Importance of study:
The importance of the study is to see how much impact the media creates on the public and if the public can rely on journalists for true information.

Primary objectives:
The primary objectives of this study are: to know how many people are dependant on news. to know what public feels about objectivity in journalists.

to find out if journalists are controlled by their news houses or government

to find out what public expects from the media.

Secondary objectives: to make people aware of the current situation.

to ask suggestions from public on how media can be effective.

To analyze the survey and make a report and find out what people feel about journalists.

Sample size:
The study was restricted to 100 residents of Chennai.

Data collection:
The data was collected from both primary and secondary sources.

Primary data-it means first hand information which was collected through a questionnaire given to students,women,working class etc whose age were above eighteen years.

Secondary data-It also means second hand information wahich was collected from news papers, magazines and websites.

Sampling method:
The sampling method used was random sampling.

Limitations:
The study was restricted to a sample size of 100.

The study was confined only to the city of chennai.

A few subjects were hesitant to give their personal information.

The bar diagram represents the survey taken for the question “Are Journalists being objective?”
The green represents people who said ‘Yes’ to the questions asked to them where as blue represents people who have answered ‘No’ and yellow represents the number of people who have answered ‘I don’t know’. This survey is taken out of hundred percent. The first question “Do you think that the news on paper and tv are always true?” tells us that 65% of them have said ‘Yes’, 10% have said ‘No’ and 25% have said ‘I don’t know’. In the second question “Do you think that Journalists always have evidences to support their news?” tells us that 45% have said ‘Yes’ , 20% have said ‘No’ and 35% have said ‘I don’t know’ . In the third question “Do you feel that the Journalists are being controlled by the news houses?” tells us that 85% have said ‘Yes’ , none of them have said ‘No’ and 15% have said ‘I don’t know’ . The fourth question “Is objectivity necessary in journalist?” tells us that 30% have said ‘Yes’ , 55% have said ‘No’ and 15% have said ‘I don’t know’. In the final question “Do you think Journalists are always objective in their work?” tells us that 70% have said ‘Yes’ , none of themhave said ‘No’ and 30% have said “I don’t know”

The Pie Chart displays the responses of the people who have answered to the question “With regards to fair reporting what are your expectations of news media?” In this pie chart 40%of them have answered “Reports of happening in the outskirts”. 25% of them have said “Concrete Evidence” , 20% have said “Clarity of Reporting” and 15% have said “Petty Issues” should be avoided.