Death of old-school journalism may be why Catholic church vandalism isn’t a big story — GetReligion

I have examined the possible reasons many times in the past at GetReligion, but the release of a new report — under the title “Beyond Objectivity: Producing Trustworthy News in Today’s Newsrooms” — has shed some light on trends linked to “objectivity” in journalism.

Here is a key section about the report in a Washington Post column by Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor at that newspaper and a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University (click here for a GetReligion podcast that discusses this column).

Downie co-authored the report and explained what they were doing in this excerpt:  

To better understand the changes happening now, I and former CBS News president Andrew Heyward, a colleague at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, investigated the values and practices in mainstream newsrooms today, with a grant from the Stanton Foundation. What we found has convinced us that truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever “objectivity” once meant to produce more trustworthy news. We interviewed more than 75 news leaders, journalists and other experts in mainstream print, broadcast and digital news media, many of whom also advocate such a change. This appears to be the beginning of another generational shift in American journalism.

Among the news leaders who told Heyward and me that they had rejected objectivity as a coverage standard was Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press. “It’s objective by whose standard?” she asked. “That standard seems to be White, educated, fairly wealthy. … And when people don’t feel like they find themselves in news coverage, it’s because they don’t fit that definition.”

More and more journalists of color and younger White reporters, including LGBTQ+ people, in increasingly diverse newsrooms believe that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting informed by their own backgrounds, experiences and points of view.

How does that affect news coverage? Bias isn’t only in stories and how they are reported on, but in the ones news organizations don’t cover. It’s an editorial choice to report on a story. Not doing so is as well.

“There is some confusion about the value of good reporting versus point of view,” said current Post executive editor Sally Buzbee, who noted that many journalists want to make a difference on such issues as climate change, immigration and education. “We stress the value of reporting,” she said, “what you are able to dig up — so you (the reader) can make up your own mind.”

“The consensus among younger journalists is that we got it all wrong,” Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor in chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, told us. “Objectivity has got to go.”

If this is the typical newsroom mindset, has today’s journalism become detached from reality? If it presupposes narratives and ideas that push ideas that are in vogue, that’s not a good thing. What to create anger and divisions in a culture? This is how journalists can do it.

In addition to journalists abandoning objectivity in favor of an ever-changing worldview that resembles what’s fashionable politically or culturally, news organizations are increasingly focused on the now and the future. Period.

This long-winded preamble takes us to the church vandalism story, one that has included mostly Catholic houses of worship and crisis-pregnancy centers.

Why aren’t newsrooms investigating this trend of the past few years, while seeking information from activists on both sides of this issue?

The aforementioned report on this topic sheds light on it all. Also, click here for a new tmatt Religion & Liberty essay on issues related to this sad situation.

If mainstream news coverage of religion has become increasingly hostile to the beliefs of many Americans, it is because those beliefs are not respected by those doing the journalism. Without basic standards for doing journalism, ignoring the church vandalism trend — like many in the mainstream press have for a few years, despite a sharp increase in cases — has become business as usual.