For thousands of years, humans have been searching for truth, for virtue and for beauty, and the most they want to achieve is a combination of all these three aspects. But now appears a doubt that whether these three things can harmoniously inosculate with each other. As is known to all that the current world is an information world, a media world where people could communicate with each other and receive varieties of information through the omnipotent media, people read and listen to the articles, critiques, essays and reports and dip themselves into the endless sea of thoughts, opinions, values spread by the authors and publishers. Therefore it is quite essential to figure out whether the readers, the receivers are surrounded in a "true" media environment, is the information they received true and objective. This essay will firstly introduce the basic theory foundation of this article by Michael Schudson and make a brief analysis of it, next the essay will talk about the form and the content of journalism. Then it puts emphasis on the objectivity within journalism and lastly it put the theoretical analysis into a current case and generally discusses how to reach the objectivity in journalism. Michael Schudson (2001, pp.149-170) has said "the belief in objectivity is a faith in facts, a distrust in values and a commitment to their segregation". Living in such an informative society and with journalism playing a much more influential role in our daily life, people cannot help wondering if there is ever such a thing as 'objectivity' in News reporting or journalism. To response to this question, one point has to be figured out that facts with values are often not truth. There is no doubt that truth are objective and will not change in spite of any judgments or evaluations. However, values are something subjective and usually with personal positions and opinions, therefore written materials with values cannot wholly and objectively reflect what the thing is really like. In Philip Meyer's (1995) Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity, he said, "one measure of the discomfort that journalists feel over the concept of public journalism is the great variety of names given it, e.g. Civic journalism, citizen journalism, community journalism, or communitarian journalism. It's as though all who try some version of it want to distance themselves from the questionable practices of the others." From this, it is quite easy to discover that even a name or the concept of journalism, there are so many versions, every group wants to name it in their own way and represent their interest. Is it possible that all of them are true reflection of journalism or actually none of them is objective. A name is controversial like this, then let alone the content. According to Philip Meyer (1995), the public journalism he is interested in participating has six defining elements. A brief analysis of the six elements and furthermore, the content ,the structure, the purpose of the journalism will help find out the truth. The first one is "a desire to rebuild a community's sense of itself which mainly indicates journalism is closely related with the society, (Philip Meyer, 1995)" the realization of the citizens towards themselves and the society determines the vitality of journalism. The second one is "a longer attention span (Philip Meyer, 1995)" which means that journalistic reports should spend a relatively long period focusing on one issue so that the public could have a comprehensive understanding of what is happening from every different perspective. The third one is "A willingness to go deeply into explaining the systems that direct our lives(Philip Meyer, 1995)." The reason why journalism should go deeply is because of the limit of time and space, the reports will be restricted from width and depth, to enable the audience to see deeper and wider, reports have to surpass the shallow surface and reach the underlying facts. The fourth one is "More attention to the rational middle ground of issues and less attention to extremes (Philip Meyer, 1995)." It is often found that many reports are fond of discovering bits and pieces, odds and ends, and they are usually something trivial and unimportant, what's more, the bits and pieces are mostly the tails or extremes of an event or statistics, thus they cannot truly reflect what the thing is. The fifth one is "A preference for substance over tactics in covering political argument (Philip Meyer, 1995)." It is a common phenomenon in two-party or multi-party countries to adopt the media as a propaganda tool. In those countries, media are controlled by the government or parties and the only aim of journalism is to promote themselves via the newspapers, the radio, the programs, politicians are the only things worth knowing. However, it is far from the public's expectation. The sixth thing is "A desire to foster deliberation (Philip Meyer, 1995)" which implies that the audience need and have the responsibility to make their voice as well as understand someone else's views, for these voices could help journalism get more and closer access to the real life of the public and as a result report what public really want to see or hear. But get to the point, in terms of the above six elements of public journalism, journalism cannot be absolutely objective. See the definition of journalism, "Journalism is the timely reporting of events at the local, provincial, national and international levels. Reporting involves the gathering of information through interviewing and research, the results of which are turned into a fair and balanced story for publication or for television or radio broadcast. Journalism is not justfact-finding, it includes many aspects like media analysis, opinion writing or commentary (Philip Meyer, 1995)." It mentions that for journalists, they need to or have to balance the news and turn them into every story, or in another way, the objective news has to be localized or customer-oriented. And in this process, the core, the truth, the faithfulness of the events will be more or less altered. Charlotte Wien (2011) in his "Defining Objectivity within Journalism" put forward a similar view that "journalism utilises concepts such as 'truth', 'reality' and 'objectivity' and, as a professional discipline, must therefore reflect upon what these concepts mean and how they are to be operationalised, unless journalism is willing to admit that it it totally devoid of ideas (Charlotte Wien, p.2)." Charlotte's view could be perceived like this, the things are objective and existing, but they are there and they will not automatically become acquainted with people. To inject vigor into these dead things, people have to give their ideas, emotions and values to them which inevitably and unconsciously murder the objectivity of journalism. To illustrate the above view, one recent event is cited and analyzed concerning that. "The UN human rights committee has voted overwhelmingly to condemn rights violations by the Syrian government against pro-democracy protesters. It comes after previous attempts to get a similar resolution passed by the Security Council were vetoed by Russia and China. The BBC United Nations correspondent says the committee vote does not have the legal power of one in the Security Council but does reinforce Syria's international isolation (BBC 2011)." About this piece of news, nobody has a comprehensive and all-sided grasp of what is going on in Syria. The fact about Syria is objective and remains unknown to the great majority of the whole world until BBC reports the event, and simultaneously, this event is painted with BBC colors. It is common phenomenon that the act or proposal does not pass because of some opposing voices and rejection from some countries, BBC made an emphasis on the two countries, Russia and China who veto the resolution. It is true that the two countries voted against the resolution, but is there a need to give prominence to them compared with others. Another point BBC also indicates is that the committee vote does not have the legal power of one in the Security Council but reinforce Syria's international isolation. It is to be discussed whether the committee vote has the legal power, but one point can be demonstrated that BBC shows a sense of humanism towards Syria who is suffering from all kinds of stress and disasters. Once the media endows the objective events and materials with a little sense of personal colors, the balance of objectivity will be lean and the truth cannot be 100% presented to the public. Therefore, for this case, the reporter cannot hold any personal positions or ideas when reporting the event, he can neither support the Security Council nor sympathize with Syria, all he could do is to describe what is happening as an outsider without any emotions or values. As Philip Meyer said, a faith in objectivity will inevitably leads to the distrust in values and the segregation of these two aspects could better guarantee the objective effect. But without using any of our thoughts or ideas, there would arise another problem. Charlotte Wien (2011) in his "Defining Objectivity within Journalism" also said that " The critique of the concept of objectivity in this model builds precisely upon the idea of what we now know, with rather great certainty, namely, the facts do not speak for themselves, that facts in the meaning of recordability, are only a surface, which is simply incomprehensible if not explained with underlying, but often not immediately recordable associations (Andren, Hemanus et al. 1979;11; my translation from the Danish) (Charlotte Wien, p.3)." That is in another famous saying, "things do not always appear as they may seem." Many things are so complicated and they call for people's acquaintance, understanding, analysis, research and even speculation. For to dig out the underlying facts, reporters have to go through this long and complicated process, and it is rather difficult to keep being objective while doing this subjective activities. After all, those events are dead and cannot record themselves. To sum up, due to events' unrecordable property and inevitable subjective activities when they are presented by the reporters, it is rather difficult to make a 100% faithful record of them and the objectivity within journalism is almost unacquirable.
References:
Michael Schudson, 1995, The objectivity norm in American journalism, University of California, San Diego.
Philip Meyer, 1995, Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Charlotte Wien, 2011, Defining Objectivity within Journalism, Syddansk University, Denmark.
BBC Homepage, 2011, news, London, Britain.
