One of the biggest criticisms of the media these days is that it’s objective to a fault. Consider the flack some editors have taken recently for giving equal time to both sides of the vaccination “debate,” which most would agree shouldn’t be considered a debate. The study that linked vaccines to autism has been debunked: it was bad science. And if we consider the big picture, even the most strident libertarian should and probably would agree that in cases of public safety, individual liberties sometimes need to take a backseat to the collective good.
So, yes. Fire away. There are some easy targets. But be careful what you wish for. Objectivity is still the foundation of the whole enterprise. I had an old journalism professor who was fond of saying: “I’ve never trusted anyone who was sure of anything.” I’m not sure there’s a more important ethos in the business.
In my line of work, we often hear the objective-to-a-fault charge when it comes to climate change coverage. Activists are upset – understandably – that politicians in Washington are still debating whether anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing the planet to warm, an idea that good science supports. They want the media to treat this like “the biggest story of our time,” and trust me, they let us know. It’s affecting coverage in good ways and bad. The fact that all mainstream media organizations are operating from the point of view that the planet is warming and humans are contributing to it (even if Congress is not) is a feather in the activists’ cap. But I’m also seeing an increase in sloppy coverage of this big, confusing, amorphous issue; pushback from writers I work with who object when we edit out certainty in future predictions (changing the word “will” to “may”); best-in-the-business papers like The New York Times blurring the lines between editorialization and coverage, as in this recent story on carbon accounting subtitled: Will Cutting Trees Cut Carbon? In it, the author gives a nod to the idea that there are two sides to the debate, but then fails to make any distinction between sugar cane farming and tree farming, or forestry as it’s practiced in Vermont and forestry that’s practiced in Haiti. With the help of a CO2-obsessed academic, the article pretty much decides that cutting trees is bad. He ends the piece with the line: “Razing [our forests] for fuel is not the best idea.” I wrote the author and explained that when I harvest low-grade logs destined for the woodstove or the pellet mill I’m not razing a forest, and that CO2 is not the end-all, be-all metric by which we might measure the forest’s or the planet’s environmental health. But I’m sure my letter was outnumbered 20 to 1 by activists saying: “Go get ’em, Tiger.”
I read an interesting piece on climate change recently by author Charles Eisenstein; you can read it here. In it, he points out that our climate change obsession might be analogized to the way we view money and war.
“If we agree that the survival of humanity is at stake, then any means is justified, and any other cause…becomes an unjustifiable distraction from the only important thing. Taken to its extreme, it requires that we harden our hearts to the needs in front of our faces. There is not time to waste! Everything is at stake! It’s do or die! How similar to the logic of money and the logic of war.”
Even when it’s well intentioned, activism is myopic. It reduces something that’s complex into something simple. In this sense, a complicit and unskeptical media that gets behind the do-or-die effort to reduce carbon emissions is no different than the complicit and unskeptical media that fails to investigate or differentiate fact from fiction in a nation’s run up to war. It’s precisely because climate change is a big deal that we need good old fashioned skeptical, cynical, objective journalism more than ever.
The media needs to constantly critique itself and be critiqued by others – it should struggle with the idea of what to cover and how to cover it. The point I would add is that consumers of media have a responsibility here, too. We’re all grownups – we ought to be able to absorb competing perspectives and triangulate truth. And to help us do this, it’s a lot better to have media err on the side of objectivity than certainty.
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