Karl du Fresne: On objectivity, balance and honesty in journalism

Several weeks ago I listened to a discussion on America’s National Public Radio network about objectivity in journalism. The three participants included Adam Reilly, the politics reporter for the Boston TV station GBH, and Callum Borchers, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
The third guest on the panel, Juliette Kayyem, was not a journalist, but a politically well-connected former Democratic Party candidate for governor of Massachusetts and occasional columnist for the Boston Globe.

The discussion about objectivity took place in the immediate aftermath of the tragic July 4 floods in Texas and the question raised by Kayyem was whether media coverage had paid enough attention to the role of climate change.

This evolved into a more general discussion about objectivity and balance. Climate change has brought these issues to the fore in journalism, as has the polarising presidency of Donald Trump.

Kayyem said she wanted to believe in journalistic objectivity but confessed, with commendable honesty, that she didn’t understand the difference between objectivity and balance.

Borchers replied that the two shouldn’t be conflated and then proceeded to give his own off-the-cuff definition of journalistic objectivity. This went something like “discovering the truth as fully as you can and to the best of your ability without worrying if your story happens to piss someone off”.

That’s okay as far as it goes, but it’s a bit loose and fuzzy for my liking and too open to subjective interpretation. It leaves a lot of wiggle room for journalists who see themselves as being on an ideological or political mission, as many do. It doesn’t say anything, for example, about being open to competing views.

By comparison, balance is relatively straightforward. It’s the notion that journalism should fairly report conflicting sides of an issue. Many journalists and teachers of journalism sneeringly dismiss this as “both sides-ism”. They would prefer to decide for themselves which arguments are valid and ignore the rest.

TVNZ’s highest-profile journalist, John Campbell, is one of those who eschew the requirement of balance, and once ridiculed the idea by asking rhetorically whether the SS guards at Auschwitz should have been allowed to put their side of the story. But you can support almost any argument by choosing the most extreme hypotheticals. (In any case, it would have been revealing to learn how the Auschwitz guards justified their monstrous conduct. Journalists should be open to information from any source that throws new light on an issue.)

The positive thing about the Boston radio discussion is that here were four media commentators (the moderator, a loudmouth named Jim Braude, also weighed in) talking seriously, if only briefly, about the principle of journalistic objectivity. This should be applauded, given that the very idea of objectivity has been attacked as fantasy in recent decades by influential journalists and academics.

It’s also encouraging that objectivity is suddenly being cited in New Zealand as a journalistic value worth aspiring to. In a recent episode of The Detail, RNZ’s head of podcasts, Tim Watkin, stressed the importance of showing that journalists could take themselves out of the story. Watkin acknowledged the pressures that tempt the media to push the boundaries between facts and opinion, but he clearly viewed the discipline of objectivity as something that could help rebuild trust in the media.

Given that RNZ is struggling with a steadily shrinking radio audience and diminishing public trust in the media overall (two trends that are almost certainly interconnected), I thought it significant that Watkin should highlight those points.

What particularly struck me about the Boston discussion was that these intelligent, highly educated Americans (you can be sure they all have impressive degrees) were wrestling over a definition of something that generations of New Zealand journalists, virtually none of them educated beyond secondary school level, grasped almost intuitively.

This was that you tried to approach every story with an open mind, kept your opinions or feelings out of it, presented the known facts in a neutral fashion, followed the story where it led and didn’t allow any relevant information or individuals to be excluded simply because they didn’t align with any preconceptions.

Broadly speaking, that’s my idea of objectivity, and it’s not rocket science. Thousands of New Zealand journalists absorbed it almost by osmosis.

There were always some exceptions to the rule. “Name” writers were given some licence to state their personal opinions, usually under their byline. But in the news columns of newspapers, objectivity and balance were basic tenets of journalism. Unfortunately the current generation has been encouraged to ignore them.

It’s true, as Callum Borchers said, that balance and objectivity are not the same thing, but they overlap. A story that lacks balance is unlikely to be a truly objective one, even by Borchers’ flexible yardstick, because if it omits relevant facts or opinions, it can’t be the “full” truth (insofar as the “full truth” can ever be definitively established).

And while we’re on the subject of balance, let’s get some misconceptions out of the way. Kayyem raised the old canard that if someone says two and two equals five, then the balance rule insists they be given equal space with those who say two and two equals four.

This argument is often used to ridicule the idea that climate change sceptics should be given equal space with those who insist that climate science is “settled”. But at best the argument is sophistry and at worst, it’s dishonest.

It’s an unarguable, objective truth, able to be grasped by a five-year-old, that two and two equals four, but there’s nothing immutable about the theory of anthropogenic climate change, which a significant minority of scientists contests.

The global warming theory may be supported by the great majority of climate scientists, but the sceptics (or denialists, as the mainstream media prefer to call them) are right to argue that science is never “settled”. In fact science depends on the questioning of accepted wisdom and the possibility that we don’t yet know everything. There’s no point at which scientists can sit back and declare, “That’s it, then – we have nothing more to learn”. The advance of knowledge depends on the contestability of ideas and theories.

In any case, “balance” in journalism has never required that equal space be given to competing arguments. That’s another canard that I saw advanced earlier this year in a piece by Tim Hunter of NBR. “The idea that journalism should provide equal weight to all aspects of a debate would involve abandoning a key function of journalism, which is to sift the wheat from the chaff,” Hunter wrote. But he was attacking a straw man.

The argument is not that dissenting views must be given equal space. The important thing is to acknowledge that there are competing arguments, and thus show that whatever proposition or idea is being advanced (for instance, anthropogenic climate change) isn’t unanimously accepted.

But even this is too much of a challenge for the totalitarian ideological mindset that now governs much mainstream journalism. Hence you get major news organisations proudly declaring, as if it’s a point of honour, that they will give no coverage to climate change sceptics. This was an extraordinary and inexcusable turnaround for an industry that was largely founded on, and depends on, the principle of free speech.

And as it is for climate change, so it has been for other issues such as Covid vaccination, trans-gender rights and the Treaty of Waitangi. The mainstream media simply ignored any views that didn’t conform to their own. Or if they acknowledged them at all, it was only so they could be derided.

Even worse, media organisations signed up to a narrow and rigid interpretation of Treaty rights – one that allowed no room for dissent – as a condition of their eligibility for generous taxpayer-funded handouts under the former Labour government. Small wonder that trust in the media has plummeted. I don’t think editors and owners realised the damage they were doing to their credibility.

Now here’s another defining principle of objectivity in journalism: it means being prepared to write stories that express opinions or explore ideas that the journalist may not agree with.

Generations of New Zealand reporters accepted that rule without question. I worked with countless left-wing journalists who unhesitatingly reported statements that personally were anathema to them. But this would come as a radical and novel concept to many of the journalists currently helping to set the news agenda.

Some reporters (Marc Daalder of Newsroom is one, though there are plenty of others) can always be relied on to write stories that either promote ideas and opinions they support or disparage ones they don’t like. I get the impression people like Daalder would sooner have a limb amputated than devote space to an idea they find ideologically unacceptable – that is, unless they’re attacking it.

All of which brings us back to Tim Hunter of NBR. His sneering piece on LinkedIn, scornfully headlined How to be a journalist, was written in response to two blog posts by the lawyer Philip Crump, who was associated with the Canadian investor Jim Grenon’s bid for control of the board of NZME, publisher of the New Zealand Herald and owner of the NewstalkZB network.

Grenon’s raid on NZME was characterised in the media as an attempted right-wing takeover and Crump was seen as a co-conspirator. That alone made him a media target, but Crump went further by publishing posts in which he criticised media left-wing bias and suggested some rules that might help restore public trust in journalism.

Some of Crump’s suggestions were unexceptionable (be accurate with facts, present them objectively, don’t follow a pre-determined narrative, don’t assume you know “the truth”, don’t sacrifice balance for advocacy, allow readers to make up their own minds, avoid loaded language). I spent well over half a century in newspaper and magazine journalism, including substantial spells as an editor and news editor on daily papers, and his points struck me as eminently reasonable. But Crump’s piece provoked Hunter into a sneering, condescending and highly defensive response.

Crump’s sin, I believe, was that he had the impertinence, as an outsider, to suggest ways that journalists could do their job better and thus start rebuilding the public trust they have squandered. What made it worse was that he was perceived as tainted by association with conservatives who were protesting against a pervasive left-wing influence in the media.

Red rag, meet bull (and never mind the validity of Crump’s arguments).

I can’t help wondering too whether some in the media resented Crump for showing them up by writing a series of explosive pieces analysing details of Labour’s Three Waters plan that the mainstream media preferred not to investigate and exposing rampant nepotism and conflicts of interest involving a Labour cabinet minister. Crump’s assiduously researched articles, published in 2022 under the pseudonym Thomas Cranmer, were something of a masterclass in investigative journalism but were steadfastly ignored by mainstream media, presumably because they reflected badly on a government that most journalists supported and felt protective toward.

Before I go any further, I should disclose that Hunter and I have something of a history – albeit a brief and not very happy one. Hunter was a co-editor of NBR four years ago when I was invited to contribute a regular opinion column to the paper. The column was stillborn because Hunter disagreed with a couple of things I said in my inaugural piece and wanted two paragraphs deleted. I refused and withdrew from my contract.

Leaving aside the irony that I was invited to write a column because NBR presumably thought I had something of value to say but then tried to stop me saying it, my experience didn’t exactly imbue me with respect for Hunter. It follows that I don’t regard him as a paragon of journalistic values, although that’s how he presented himself in his attack on Crump.

Consider this: if Hunter didn’t want me as a columnist to express an opinion he didn’t agree with, how likely would it be that he would give space in the paper to any views he disapproved of? How committed could he be to the idea of editorial balance? For me, his credibility was shot to pieces.

I should make it clear that I don’t dispute the ultimate right of an editor to decide what goes in the paper, but the public is entitled to judge a publication on its openness to dissenting views and its commitment to fairness and balance. In my opinion, Hunter failed that test. I was in charge of opinion columns at Wellington’s Evening Post for more than 10 years, dealing with provocative writers as diverse as Bob Jones, Alan Duff, Marilyn Waring and Mary Varnham, and no one was ever censored because we didn’t like what they said.

That aside, Hunter’s response to Crump was a farrago of specious half-truths, red herrings and examples carefully cherry-picked to support his arguments.

For instance, Crump had urged caution when it came to the use of anonymous sources and said journalists often cited selectively chosen experts while sidelining dissenting expertise. I think that has unarguably been true in recent years, especially on issues such as climate change, the Treaty, vaccinations and mis/disinformation, not to mention anything to do with the so-called culture wars. But Hunter misconstrued this (wilfully?) as an argument against any use of anonymous sources, then tediously but predictably held up the example of the Watergate disclosures – 53 years ago – as evidence that non-disclosure of sources is sometimes vital.

This is a form of false equivalence. I didn’t interpret Crump’s piece as arguing against the use of anonymous whistleblowers, where reporters sometimes have compelling reasons to respect their sources’ privacy. I think he was referring more generally to the insidious use of supposed experts, who are not always named, to shape journalistic narratives. Mostly they are from academia and invariably they lean sharply to the left.

In any case, the argument is not so much about the use of “experts”, since they’re entitled to their opinions. It’s more about the suppression of legitimate voices because they don’t pass ideological tests.Hunter then lays the blame for declining trust in the media not on anything the New Zealand media have done (or failed to do), but on Donald Trump’s fulminations about “fake news”. A convenient excuse; let yourself off the hook by blaming the US president.

Even less convincingly, he goes on to cite the appalling practices of the British tabloid press, implying they’ve given all the media – including our own – a bad name. (I bet Hunter, who is Scottish, was itching to blame Rupert Murdoch, whom British journalists hate. But he heroically resisted the temptation.) Later, when trying to deflect Crump’s criticism of sensationalism in the New Zealand media, he harks back to the British Sunand Daily Mirror of the 1980s and argues that sensationalist “clickbait” is nothing new.

I have a suggestion for him: try to keep to examples that are relevant to the here and now. Don’t muddy the waters with tired, self-serving references to Trump, Watergate and British tabloids. This is New Zealand in 2025 that we’re talking about.

In his desperation to discredit Crump’s arguments, Hunter even goes back to an issue of the Evening Post in 1885 in an attempt to prove that a certain style of journalism, in which the reporter eschews the traditional “who, what, when, where and why” approach to a story, is not new. But a specific instance from nearly one and a half centuries ago doesn’t negate the legitimacy of Crump’s general observation that the abandonment of the old, "straight" approach to story writing opens the way to more personalised and subjective takes on the news.

Ultimately, this debate is really about honesty: not just honesty in discussing the issues facing journalism, but far more importantly, honesty in the way journalists report contentious issues. A key reason people have lost faith in the media is that they suspect they are not getting the full story, and unfortunately their suspicion is too often justified.

I thought Hunter’s vitriolic piece said far more about him that it did about Crump, and it was disappointing that those eagerly cheering him on from the sidelines on LinkedIn included a couple of senior figures from the journalistic establishment. It would be a grave mistake to assume Hunter was speaking for all journalists, least of all those of us who recall a time when journalism enjoyed far greater trust and respect than it does now.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz from where this article was sourced.