The Convenient Lie of 'Objectivity'
When objectivity is so revered while at the same time so ill-defined, it is inevitably marginalized reporters who suffer the consequences.
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Image: Hulton Archive
When Washington Post editors banned national politics reporter Felicia Sonmez from reporting on sexual misconduct because she is an assault survivor, they reportedly told her that they were worried about the “appearance of a conflict of interest.” Top editors reassured her that they themselves didn’t think there was a conflict; they believed she could write an unbiased story on the subject.
Sonmez spoke out about her sexual assault in 2018, following a letter she wrote to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China accusing Jon Kaiman, her former colleague, of assaulting her one night when she was drunk. A woman named Laura Tucker had made similar allegations against Kaiman earlier that year, and national outlets picked up both of their stories. Kaiman, who was working at the Los Angeles Times at the time, resigned after the paper launched an investigation into the accusations. (Kaiman has denied both Sonmez’s and Tucker’s allegations and insisted that “all acts we engaged in were mutually consensual.”)
Months later, when sexual misconduct allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh emerged, Sonmez was told by Post editors that she couldn’t cover the story. The restrictions were temporarily lifted before being reinstated in 2019, according to Somnez. Since then they have prevented her from writing about Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s revelation that she is a survivor of assault; the several allegations against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Missouri Governor Eric Greitens; and the Violence Against Women Act.
After Sonmez tweeted on March 28 about these restrictions on her reporting—and after Politico and Jezebel covered Sonmez’s story—the Post announced that it would be lifting the coverage ban. “Following a newsroom discussion two weeks ago, editors began re-evaluating limitations on the scope of Felicia’s work as a breaking-news reporter,” Kristine Coratti Kelly, Chief Communications Officer at the Washington Post, told Jezebel. “They have concluded such limitations are unnecessary.”
What might at first seem unusual and anomalous about what Sonmez faced at the Post is in fact the opposite. Her treatment is symptomatic of newsrooms’ sometimes uncritical devotion to the principle of “objectivity,” which can easily be warped and deployed for sinister ends. Part of the problem with objectivity is that no one can quite agree on what it is: Does it mean attempting to occupy the exact middle ground between two extremes of opinion (what New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen and others call “the view from nowhere”)? Or does it mean balancing the scales, because doing so creates a more precise rendering of the truth? Is the latter what we would call “fairness,” and if so, is this what many of us actually mean when we say objectivity, or is fairness a separate idea entirely? These are difficult questions that don’t necessarily have a single, definitive answer. Reporters face them anew each time they sit down to write a story.
When objectivity is so revered while at the same time so ill-defined, it is only a short road to it being weaponized, its most facile interpretations indulged. In this instance, the Washington Post has reduced objectivity to a state of being; a reporter either has it or she doesn’t. The having, it seems, fundamentally relies on what body a reporter occupies, and the experiences they’ve had in it. When objectivity is taken to this extreme, it is inevitably marginalized reporters who suffer the consequences, as well as their audiences, who are denied the rigorous, nuanced, and intellectually honest coverage writers can produce when an issue hits close to home.
“It’s just not workable to broadly bar reporters from covering issues connected to their identity or their experience, and in practice most such rules fall apart when subjected to any real scrutiny,” said Parker Higgins, the advocacy director at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Standards regarding conflicts of interest need to be “thoughtfully crafted so that they can be applied fairly and effectively,” Higgins continued. “Otherwise those same rules threaten to marginalize the people whose perspective can lead them to a fuller understanding of the truth that readers are looking for in the first place.”
What else might be a conflict of interest, according to this rubric? Can a person who has had an abortion write about abortion? Can an Asian person report on the recent surge in racist anti-Asian attacks? Can a person who has experienced police violence report on Black Lives Matter or police brutality?
What Sonmez’s story makes so clear is the way journalistic neutrality can incentivize reporters to carry on as if they are unbiased or else potentially disclose painful traumas like the one Sonmez experienced and recuse themselves from coverage where their sensitivities and perspective are needed most. Both options are disastrous for journalism. The idea that being a survivor of sexual assault could make someone “biased” in their coverage of sexual misconduct—or, as Post editors maintained, that it would at least create the appearance of bias—foretells concerning possibilities. With roughly one in five American women having been the victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime, it would appear as though many women reporters would have to declare themselves too “biased” to cover the subject. If we were to take into account the broad spectrum of sexual misconduct (including, say, the sort of inappropriate touching and comments Cuomo stands accused of) I would venture that nearly every woman reporter would have to take themselves off misconduct-related stories.