WILL THAULT: Is objective journalism an oxymoron?

Essentially, Rolling Stone “gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson famously observed back in the ’70s, “… (T)here’s no such thing as objective journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.” Actually, speaking from first-hand experience, I’m afraid I have to agree with Thompson.

I began my early broadcasting career as a morning news reporter on a Talk Radio station, landing a job as an evening news anchor on a local cable TV channel a few months later. Confident in my natural talent for gathering and reporting the news, I was sure that I’d soon be on my way to becoming the next Walter Cronkite. And, in recognizing my special gift, I was duty-bound to objectively “interpret” the news events of the day, in service to my grateful unenlightened masses.

If you sense a touch of pomposity in my youthful self-assurance, you’d be right. I was convinced that it was my journalistic duty to redirect misguided thinking. Although laughable today, my self important delusions of grandeur matched perfectly with Thompson’s observations. Having a mass media platform from which to inform is heady stuff. It takes someone with confident restraint to resist the temptation to deliver a straight news story without cloaking one’s bias in context or analysis.

To convey the complete idea of a story, the lead line in newspapers has traditionally relied on the five Ws: who, what, where, when and why. This ironclad rule persisted for more than a century. But sometime around the 1960s, journalists began embellishing the five Ws with interpretation beyond “just the facts.”

In the early days of CNN, I philosophized over lunch in Atlanta with one of the network heads. I asked him for his definition of news. He responded with an eloquent, if not lengthy, discourse on its meaning. After exhausting the topic, I countered with my own simple definition: News is the dissemination of information. End of story.

Ah, but here’s the rub. The world is overrun with an avalanche of unfiltered news coming at us from all directions in all shapes and sizes every second. The human mind can’t comprehend this information overload, so someone has to disseminate it. In the social media world, you have to be the disseminator through the choices of the influencers you follow and the podcasts you listen to. In the professional journalism world, an editorial decision is made on the most important news stories to assign to Page 1, A Block or during the hourly update. No matter how objective that decision-maker is, their opinion on what’s most newsworthy influences what you read, see or hear in the mainstream news.

So there you have it. Even with impartial, balanced reporting without the spin, one has to admit that there’s no such thing as truly objective journalism, nor can there ever be. This brings us to the most honest section of your newspaper — the editorial page. Here you will find opinions from the left, right and sometimes from the center. There’s no hidden agenda or bias disguised as news. You usually know which way the columnists lean. It’s their job to express their opinion, and it’s the reader’s job to agree, disagree or be persuaded to change their minds on a given subject. It may make you mad, sad, happy or thoughtful, but if you have that “ah-ha” moment, it makes the work of a columnist all worthwhile. Regardless, it promotes that stimulating experience called critical thinking.

Since objectivity in the news is truly an oxymoron, the challenge then lies in what to do with the Op-Eds. Here, a balance of opinions on the editorial page becomes the crucial test of a paper’s true commitment to objectivity — something many will argue has been lost to even the oldest legacy newspaper companies in America.

Today, controversy is swirling around the editorial staffs and the owners of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the L.A. Times. Breaking precedent with a decades-long tradition, all three were prevented from endorsing a presidential candidate this election year. Some staffers even resigned in protest over this decision.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, owner of the Washington Post and a self described centrist when it comes to political ideology, angered many when he prevented his editorial board from releasing their endorsement days before the election.

Even more sensational, Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the L.A. Times, took the endorsement ban one step further recently by announcing a soon-to-be implemented artificial intelligence (AI) feature that will act as a “bias meter” for both news and opinion. Quoted in “thewrap. com” Soon-Shiong said, “… (Y)ou have a bias meter so that someone could understand as a reader that the source of the article has some level of bias.” He went on to say, “The reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story, based on that story, and then give comments. It is our obligation to ensure that our readers can tell what is news versus just opinion.”

On X (formally known as Twitter), Soon-Shiong wrote, “Every American’s views should be heard, and we will label opinion as ‘Voices’ … Voices of California and of the USA.” Is this the beginning of a new trend in news reporting? Will other media follow? Can AI be more trusted than all the disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, fake news, fact-checkers out there? I wonder … Perhaps objective journalism will return after biased reporting starts getting the flag. We’ll still have to rely on managing editors to disseminate the news, but maybe there’s still hope yet for journalism to return to its once respected status.

Maybe. To echo the words of the Great Communicator, “Trust, but verify.” Will Thault, who recently moved from Albany to be closer to family, is a retired businessman who has long been a regular contributor to The Albany Herald.