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Michael Schudson’s “Discovering the News” (1978) is highly relevant to today’s debates over journalism. Says the objectivity ideal arose in 1920s-1930s out of a loss of faith in democracy and markets.
Also notable that publishers and editors turned to objectivity as one response to the rising militancy of @newsguild (from which Walter Lippmann resigned after it endorsed a series of editorial resolutions in 1937).
By the 1960s objectivity was already under attack.
When I hear @WesleyLowery call for rebuilding journalism on a foundation of “moral clarity,” I can’t help but think of the muckrakers a century earlier—Tarbell, Steffens, Riis, Ray Stennard Baker and Ida B. Wells—who recognized the inadequacy of “just the facts.”
I never studied journalism formally, have been a mere practitioner for 20 years, but I’m finding it useful now to read @mschudson2, @VWPickard and above all Walter Lippmann.
Eerily similar to what’s going on now, 50 years later.
Apologies for misspelling Ray Stannard Baker’s name, above. Useful summary of his life here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/wilson-ray-stannard-baker/
@mschudson2 ends by citing Robert Lowell on Eugene McCarthy and concluding that “there is no new ideal in journalism to successfully challenge objectivity.”
