Intellectual fashions in journalism, as in every other field of human endeavour, shift and change in cycles. One such cycle — central to the ethics of journalism — concerns the question of impartiality. In journalism’s earliest days, writers such as Erasmus of Rotterdam were polemicists and satirists as much as chroniclers. The pamphleteers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who included Daniel Defoe and Tom Paine, were passionate barrow-pushers.
As newspapers became industrialised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a breed of person we call the media mogul emerged, shamelessly using his (always his) newspaper to advance his commercial and political interests.
Journalists were what the founder of the Australian Journalists’ Association, Bertie Cook, called a ‘spineless, downtrodden crew’. He meant they could either toe the company line or exercise what Creighton Burns, editor of The Age from 1981 to 1989, called the ‘privilege of resignation’. If the mogul wanted something written or written a certain way, they had no choice but to comply if they wanted to pay the bills.
By the 1940s, the reputation of newspapers, journalism and journalists was so alarmingly shoddy that Henry Luce of Time, along with Encyclopaedia Britannia, funded what was called the US Commission on the Freedom of the Press. Its report, produced in 1947, had an immense influence on journalism practice.
At its centre were a number of core propositions, one of which concerned the media’s duty to supply the public with reliable and up-to-date information. From this, a central tenet of ethical journalism arose: the requirements to verify facts, to confine news reports to those facts, to separate news reportage from opinion and to label opinion clearly for what it was.
These last were reprising the famous dictum of C P Scott, the towering figure who edited and eventually came to own The Manchester Guardian (today’s Guardian): ‘comment is free but facts are sacred’.
'...it is now necessary to distinguish between the impartiality of the individual journalist and the impartiality of the organisation they work for.'
Nobly intended as this shift was — away from proprietorial diktat over news, towards editorial independence — it bred a sterile and narrow form of reporting. The facts were carefully presented but readers were left to figure out for themselves what the facts meant and what the consequences of them might be.
As a reaction to this, by the 1980s a new genre of reporting had emerged, still fact-based but more analytical,