CBS and Objectivity

CBS has had an interesting week. First there was the interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates by “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Tony Dokoupil regarding Coates’ book “The Message.” Dokoupil treated Coates well, like a Republican, in that he asked some pointed questions about Coates’ book; his claim Israel was a white supremacist ethnostate akin to the Jim Crow South, that he treated Palestinians exclusively as victims without agency, and that he failed to state how Israel was surrounded by enemies pledged to destroy it.

Tough, but civil…. and then all heck broke loose

Apparently the morning show staff was so traumatized by the interview that CBS held a struggle session the next day. One of the criticisms that was hurled at Dokoupil was that he ignored the “one-sheet:”

”…the network went through its standard protocol of vetting questions through its legal, standards, and race and culture departments. The properly vetted questions were then included on what’s known as a ‘one-sheet,’ from which everyone within the show works.”

It’s standard protocol to vet questions through a race and culture department?

The other controversy at CBS came from the 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris where CBS not only cut out an unflattering clip of Kamala that it had previously released as a preview, but when challenged released a “transcript” that left out the verbiage from the previously released video clip. That’s some pretty awesome memory holing.

So what about objectivity?

Objectivity as a guiding value of journalism emerged in the 1890s as a reaction to yellow journalism. Objectivity was the idea that if a journalist simply dug out and ordered the facts the truth would emerge naturally, a way of freeing the writer from cultural and personal bias.

Walter Lippman, capturing the contemporary spirit of applying scientific tools to the social sphere, made an explicit appeal to reporters to develop a rigorous journalistic method based on verification of evidence. Objectivity would lie in the method and practice of journalism, not within the journalist himself.

This “objectivity” has been a hallowed symbol of American journalism for nearly a century. Cronkite might not have meant it when said “And that’s the way it is,” but even as a hypocrite he was still restrained by that tether to the symbol of objectivity.

Even the CBS chainsawing (editing is too polite a word) of the Kamala Harris interview, while repugnant, we can at least recognize as just good old partisan corruption. This is something Dan Rather can appreciate.

Well, now even the pretense of that tether is gone. If the Obama years didn’t do it, then certainly the last eight years of Trump Derangement Syndrome have allowed the liberal part of the media to let its freak flag fly and cut ties with “objectivity.” In their 2023 report, “Beyond Objectivity”, Leonard Downie and Andrew Heyward interviewed 75 news leaders, journalists, and other media experts in order to to investigate the new landscape of media values and practices.

Some choice parts…

Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press:

“…said she has not used the word objectivity since the early 1970s because she believes it reflects the world view of the male white establishment. ‘It’s objective by whose standards? And that standard seems to be white, educated, fairly wealthy guys,’ she explained.”

Sally Buzbee, former executive editor of the Washington Post:

“Yet, Buzbee no longer uses the word objectivity ‘because it has become a political football. If the term objectivity means the world view of middle-aged white men, it has become attacked as a word that is used to keep the status quo.”

Saeed Ahmed, former director of digital news at NPR:

“As a journalist of color, I have been told time and again that my identity doesn’t matter, that I have to shed it all to worship at the altar of objectivity,” said Ahmed, “I bristle at that notion. My lived experiences should inform what I cover.”

There are a number of dimensions in here.

The first is the standard DEI mantra of equating a certain percentage of racial/gender/LGBT+ identities in their newsroom with a diversity of viewpoints.

The second is that since “objectivity” was a concept associated with a certain identity, being white men, that it should be discarded in favor of each person pursuing what they considered their version of the truth as it relates to their personal identity.

So far, this should not surprise anyone.

The third dimension is the most critical part, what happens (or doesn’t) when each individual pursues their own version of “truth.”

The 20th Century German mathematician Kurt Gödel stated that even though a system may be consistent, its consistency cannot be demonstrated within the system. Such a result does not imply that it is impossible to prove the consistency of a system, but only that such a proof cannot be accomplished inside the system itself, but rather it needs an external frame of reference.

Taking Gödel a further step, there are two types of consistency; that of consistency of the concept and the consistency of the match-up between observed reality and the concept’s description of reality. This is also known as the distinction between a reliable and a valid argument. To put it plainly that means an argument that is internally consistent (reliable) could also be externally inconsistent (invalid) because it fails to match with an external frame of reference (what most of us call reality). Anybody who has dealt with a smooth talker in sales or politics has experienced this intuitively.

What Downie, Hayward, and all the people they interview have done is essentially jettison objectivity as an external frame of reference, deriding it as a socially constructed reality (of white men), in favor of a “diverse” system of identity-based viewpoints. However, since the “truths” of those diverse viewpoints are rooted within the individual there is no basis, by definition, of validating them by an external frame of reference. This is the essence of nihilism and post-modernism, that there is no external truth but rather the old cliché of “my truth” through which the external world must be observed.

The Dokoupil-Coates interview, the struggle session that followed, the existence of a “Race and Culture Unit” represent this repudiation of objectivity. There is no truth at CBS beyond one’s individual feelings as represented by their chosen identity.

This is of course an unstable equilibrium. People in social endeavors from polities to workplaces, run on some form of common understanding, a frame of reference external to the individual. People as individuals also form their understanding of the larger social and physical environment through interacting with it. People, like Gödel’s arguments, need some grounding in an external frame of reference. When Chesterton said, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything,” he might have meant it as a curse but really it is psychological reality.

So the issue becomes, if “objectivity” is no longer the dominant approach or ideology of the newsroom, by definition there needs to be an external frame of reference, another organizing principle, for that organization to function. It cannot exist on individual truths because those are by definition outside of the scope of social interaction. There has to be something else.

For the po-mos truth outside of the individual is socially constructed (Downie and Hayward are so far out of their depth at this point, they are just along for the ride). If you believe, as most post-modernists do, that social relations are racially or gender-constructed and therefore oppressive by nature, that means somebody is going to get the chop. As Lenin put it the struggle between oppressor and oppressed is eternal, it’s simply matter of who is doing what to whom at a certain point in time.

So in reality, what CBS means by vetting through its “Race and Culture Unit” is that the network doesn’t report the news any more, or even just support Democrats, but has chosen sides in a revolutionary struggle.

For CBS it is all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. CBS had won the victory over itself. It loved the world beyond Objectivity. It was free.