It Could Happen Here - Objectivity in Journalism

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

James, Gare, and Robert discuss the concept of objectivity in legacy media and the issues it raises.  Sources: https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2021/a-widely-shared-video-shows-a-deputy-overdosing-on-fentanyl-experts-say-its-impossible/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black-journalists-coronavirus.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases.

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It was really good. Yeah. It referenced our company's sexual harassment protocols. It was hilarious. You're never going to hear it. We weren't recording. I was recording, so you can hear my section. Okay, yeah.

That's good. You could just accept what Garrison said without context. and we'll open with that. That'll be great. Yeah. That is a classic Robert Evans intro. You just did it. I feel like it always comes from inside.

Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about journalistic objectivity. That's right. A thing that we've just demonstrated perfectly. Yeah, yeah. It's the professional media class. So let's have a little talk about media objectivity, right? it's been a major tenor of traditional legacy media that they must remain unbiased.

This hasn't always been the case in the United States, right? You used to have explicitly partisan news sources, which we have now with Fox News, I guess, but that's why you have newspapers. Like I think St. Louis has a St. Louis Democrat or the so-and-so Republican. They would be very explicitly a partisan newspaper. It's only really when journalism sort of took on this strong professional, and I mean professional here in terms of like the professions, right? Like law accounting, jobs that are associated with university education

and a class identity, that it started to assert this kind of, it's an attempt to appear rational and scientific in its methodologies, right? And one of the ways that journalism did this was to talk about objectivity. I should indicate here that objectivity is supposed to be a means of verifying information, i like that we should objectively check that what we have written is correct the example i always give is that if i'm in a protest scene where there's a clash between crowd boys and you know a group of leftists and you know someone on the left pulls out a can of mace and sprays it first that's objectively what happened now that doesn't mean that that's the only thing i report for example

if the person they maced is somebody who has been like harassing those individuals online for weeks or has been doxing them or assaulted them at previous. Like, all of that is, like, relevant context, but it doesn't change what objectively happen in that instant. Right. Like, I, it's not on me to pretend that I think these sides are equal, but it is on me to accurately report, like, what happens.

Yes. And I think one of the areas in which a lot of people, especially when we were talking about, like, you know, situations like this, a lot of folks in kind of legacy media get stuff wrong is they think that all that matters at what is what happens in that moment, right? Yeah. And what happened previously, what's happened at other engagements,

what's happened like over, you know, the last two or three years of however long the conflict's been going on that city is immaterial. Well, all that matters is what happened in that second when that reporter was on scene. And if you're thinking that way, you're going to miss more than someone who comes in with just an outright bias, you know?

Yeah. And like, I think very often it's seen as kind of, instead of being like a value of the outlet and the way it verifies information, it's seeing as being a personal kind of, like, quality that journalists should have in every aspect of their lives. Yeah. Like,

I'm aware that it's some of the big legacy broadsheets in the U.S. Like, you can't attend a protest unless you are covering the protest. Right. And there's even that famous case of that journalist being like, I don't vote because I think that that would be a violation of, like, my objectivity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember I've got it forgotten about that one. Like, you're allowed to have opinions. That's just not supposed to be. be the entire basis of your reporting, you know? Yes, exactly. Yeah, like, and I think sometimes, because people always do have opinions, right? But the opinions that are conceived of as neutral and the ones that are conceived of as being subjective are very telling, right?

Like, the media for a long time has been the domain of educated older white men, like people like me, I guess. I'm not old, but getting that way. And it also has been the domain of like capital in the state, right? like Jeffrey Bezos owned several newspapers, pro-market biases, pro-capitalism biases, pro-state biases. Those are not really investigated much in the media in the way that other biases might be, right?

It's also created this idea that the media always needs to shoot for the middle in any given discussion, which I kind of wanted to investigate a bit. When Donald Trump says something which is overt, Like, Donald Trump has said things which are nativist, right? Nativism is a form of racism. Donald Trump, therefore, has said racist shit. The way that this is far too often treated in the legacy media is, is the racist shit that Donald Trump said correct?

Or, like, maybe we should consider this racist thing that so-and-so has said, right? Rather than this shit is racist, Donald Trump has said some shit that it's racist or other members of the Republican Party. All this serves to do is when we have a, a topic and the people in Congress anchor themselves on the very far right, what is acceptable discourse. The media then moves discourse to the right, so that position is in the center, right? It serves to ratchet the Overton window to the right. I'm demonstrating this for my colleagues with hand signals, which of course only two of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to

me will be able to see. That's the right way to a podcast. It was a very compelling mime of a ratchet. It looked like you basically were doing it. I could not tell. I couldn't tell the difference. No. That's why we call you ratchet-strapped stout. Call me ratchet, Jimmy.

This is this podcast is sponsored by Invisible Ratchet. Now it's time to pivot to ad. It's not time to pivot to ad yet. I think we should talk about the way other professions concerned with the truth deal with this topic, right? Because journalism is pretty much used. in considering objectivity, something that we as individuals have to embody in every action that we take. And I guess the most relevant one will be academia, which is something else I am unfortunate enough to have participated in for far too much of my adult life. So academia,

it's still not great, but like we have accepted that everyone is biased in academia, right? Yeah. We rely on, among many other things, something called standpoint theory, right, which is a cornerstone of modern feminists thought, most of you will be aware of it, even if you're not aware of it. Basically, it holds that we see the world differently based on where we see it from. Gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, experience, age, and a million other things impact the truth we know in the world we experience. And standpoint theory posits that perhaps people, not from a certain setting, may have valuable insights into it, right? So sometimes the outsider perspective is a valuable one, but also people from that setting may see things outsiders may not

see. And we have to acknowledge those biases, right, and then continue to tell the truth. How do we tell the truth? In academia, we do something called peer review. Peer review is bad. Peer review strongly reinforces the status quo, right? I will give one example. I once had a journal article, right, for a history journal killed in peer review. The piece was about the 1909 tour of Catalonia. That was a bicycle competition for those of you who aren't familiar. It was killed because my media analysis didn't mention television coverage. The television was kind of crudely invented in the 1920s and did it become widely available until the 1940s, right? This is not a reasonable objection. Nonetheless, someone was able to kill my peace because of it, because that's how peer review

worked, right? The people who are established, people who are in positions of power can kill your shit if they want to, and they can give the most ludicrous region. That is how. peer review, among other things, reinforces status quo, right? The other thing that we do in academia is we declare our conflicts of interest. This is something we don't do in journalism, right? Like, outlets may have a conflict of interest policy, but again, like, conflicts of interest aren't explicitly declared in a piece. Like, you wouldn't see.

Sometimes NPR does it, essentially. Yeah, I mean, a number of outlets do declare, like, for example, this outlet is owned by someone who has a financial interest in the company we're reporting on or something like that. Yeah. If the Washington Post is doing a story about Jeff Bezos or Amazon, usually they will say in the bottom or the top that the paper is owned by said figure. Yeah. Where it becomes more murky is like sometimes people have a financial interest or like

if something is your beat, right, you may have other financial interests within that beat. Well, and there's there's the very common case of people, especially now with than kind of the substack journalism being like friends and social with people that they are reporting on and not disclosing to their wider audience. Yeah, like access journalism more generally, right? Yeah. Like the way I got this piece was by being invited to the drinks party. And if I say anything unkind about this person, I won't be invited to the drinks party.

Yeah. Or simply the conflict of interest that is presented by the more ludicrous my headline, the more people will click on this website and the more time they will spend on the page and the more ad revenue they might generate. Yeah. And that's really the largest issue with modern journalism is that that kind of determines almost everything for an outlet is like what's going to get clicks,

what's going to rile people up as much as possible. And that doesn't count as financial interest, right? Like the fact that the outlet has a vested financial interest in keeping you on the page is often, and as long as possible, doesn't count as like a conflict of interest in any way. And that's kind of one of the fundamental issues Whereas, like, a lot of times a lot of outlets won't let, for example, a black journalist report on a black man being murdered by the police, right?

Because they see that as like an inherent conflict of interest. And the gap between those two things is where a lot of the real problems, a lot of the worst problems in modern journalism arise. Yeah. Talking of problems, we need to pay it to ads. Sure. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged.

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Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back. Part of this also manifests in, like, journalists being supposed to not have any individual opinions about anything, even if it's irrelevant to their beat. This has been the case for a lot of people regarding the genocide. of Palestinian people, right? Like, you could be the weekend editor. You could write about brunch. And if you work at certain outlets, you are, like, under pain of losing your job,

not allowed to post what is happening in Gaza is a genocide to take a stance on these issues, right? And that is bad. Like, journalists are human beings, too. And it's ridiculous to suggest that we shouldn't or can't have opinions on these things and still do good reporting, right? we can. We just have to make sure that the reporting itself is accurate. Sometimes what this leads to is like what I guess another like Robert you spoke about it that like the inherent

conflict of interest that like traffic on a website presents for journalism. Another like inherent issue is that like every source is seen as biased, right? Like you said like black folks might not be allowed to report on black men being shot by the cops except state sources which are far too often seen as speaking the verbatim truth, right? Well, this is what the police said. Yes, yeah, that is how we get I guess a pretty good example of this. I'll link to it in the show notes is

a piece I wrote five years ago, I think, about police officers overdosing on fentanyl. Some of you will be familiar with this, some of you will not, but it is not possible to overdose on fentanyl just from being in

its presence, like in an outdoor area next to a thing that has fentanyl in it. The piece I wrote dealt with the San Diego Union Tribune who, I mean, this was a spectacular instance, I guess, of journalists like serving as police sonographers.

What happened here is that the police had produced an edited video with like music and shit of this supposed overdose, right, of a young cop who was like, I don't know what they call it, he was like apprentice with an older cop, like the more experienced cop and they were going around doing cop stuff. They found some stuff.

They tested it for fentanyl on this guy. Collapses. The younger cop. The older cop gives him several Narcans. He's not. Just waste some. Yeah. No, just like, I think there was one incident where someone received seven Narcans, which, like, like, that's a threat to your fucking nasal integrity of nothing else.

Yeah. If Narcant doesn't work the first time, like it. I mean, people do sometimes often. It's not, especially like with serious ODs, they'll often put people, like, in the hospital on drips, but you would have to take a massive dose, not just be near fucking fentanyl. Yeah, to like be, like, I think this instance, like, they were outside testing it and like they're the boot of a car. Like, it's ludicrous to think that you, and like, it would be good if they familiarize themselves with some of the, uh, what an overdose looks like, right?

Yeah. And I'm mixed. If they weren't cops, I'd respect the desire to like time theft from work, because I think that's what a lot of this is. It's like, oh shit. If I, if I, I, I'm, I'm mixed. If I, if I have an overdose. I get to stay out of work a couple of days with pay. That's a framing I'm amenable to you. I'm 14th day archives. If you're a reporter, though, like, it is absolutely on you to, oh, this person having an overdose, what are the symptoms of an overdose?

What does an overdose look like? Should I talk to a medical professional? Or you could just ask the police information officer who shared this with you, how did you verify this was an overdose? With whom did you discuss the toxicology report? In this case, that information wasn't available, right? The way I was able to obtain that, just to do, I guess, clarity is, first of all, I saw the publication where they didn't mention any fact-checking that they'd done. You can also PRA, the emails to the police, as well as from the police, right? So you can see if other reporters have done fact-checking that way or have asked any follow-up

questions that way. At they done that, they would have found out that you say that you can't overdose from fentanyl this way. They didn't even try and like both sides this, I guess. Like sometimes you'll see outlets doing that now. Like this cop overdose from fentanyl, but doctors say they can't. Like it's a, which I still think is an absolutely ludicrous practice, right? That's like saying this person tried to fly, but, you know, the people say gravity will make them fall to the ground.

Like, what are these things we know to be true? So I guess what I would propose we do in. instead of this ludicrous practice of pretending to be objective about everything all the time is that we are honest about our biases, we're honest about a conflict of interest, we're honest about our standpoint, and then we do reporting, which is obviously verifiable, right? And that means, like, you'll see that at the end of these episodes, right, we share our sources that we used. After we'll try and communicate where we got information from and how we got it.

And I think we should strive for moral clarity in the way we say things instead of striving for this middle ground. So, like, what do I mean by moral clarity? I mean saying the cops killed someone, not officer involved shooting, right? Like, if you work with fucking words and you find yourself writing something as convoluted as officer involved shooting, then you have strayed from the foundational reason for journalism existing. Yeah, you have gone beyond God's light. Yeah, you live in the darkness. There is, I think, a place for fact checkers.

I think people got a bit carried away with fact checking. I don't quite know how to phrase this correctly. I had an experience once where I had written a piece, the fact checking of that piece centered on the fact that I had used the noun beach chair to refer to this chair. Yes. The fact checker believed that it was a lawn chair. This, to me, did not impact the overall thrust of the piece, right?

Like, the nature of the chair, unfortunately, that ended up killing the story. We ran out of time to go over the court documents because of the nature of the chair discussion. And I'm not sure that's what we need to do. No. I mean, and I think the other and probably larger problem with fact-checking is, fact-shaking is an end-to-in-of-it-of-it-of-it-sa. I showed that they were wrong. I checked the fact where it's like, you know, Yeah, but what they wrote got out to 30 million people and your fact check got out to like 60.

So what you did didn't really matter. And what we should probably be doing is looking at an intervention higher up on the line to stop the bullshit from getting out rather than being obsessed with, well, I fact checked it. Like, well, but that didn't really help, you know? Yeah, right. And what point do we give that up as pointless? Yeah, like you are like not even a footnote to this other thing that this person. No, we need to, the intervention needs to be happening earlier because the bullshit is still getting out. Yeah, absolutely.

And this happens, like, I don't know, we're in this bizarre situation where, like, right-wing outlets can say what the fuck they want, right? Like, like, we have whole massive media empires going in on this idea that the 2020 election was stolen. Then we have, like, centrist outlets, instead of being, like, no, the election wasn't stolen, that's bullshit. constantly trying to like investigate those claims as if they were credible and useful rather than illustrating why they should be dismissed and then moving on, right? Like instead of investigating why this conspiracy is so important. We see that a lot with immigration right now. But we saw it a ton in the presidential debates, right?

Like it's a good example of what you were saying. J.D. Vance can just lie and even Donald Trump actually can lie about people eating dogs and cats. And it doesn't hugely matter if an hour later and news outlet tweets, oh, we fact check him and it's not okay, right? You still broadcast to millions of people that Haitian migrants eat dogs and cats, and that's not true. And I think we need to strive for something that it's closer to the truth and it's closer to fairness and it gives us moral clarity. Because what we're all doing right now, what the legacy media is doing right now is like woefully inadequate to meet the moment. Yeah. I mean, I agree. Like, I think where I don't actually know how to solve things is the incentive structure is so broken. And to an extent, all of this talk about objectivity. And when I say that, I mean like the talk that outlets and editors have about objectivity, is there more than anything to obscure the fact that the economics of journalism make it almost impossible for it to be anything but a willing agent of discipline? information. That's the real issue is you can have the Washington Post and you can have

the New York Times host good reporting, but a huge amount of their income will always come from having columnists whose entire job is to piss people off or to stoke the egos of people in power. And I don't know that the good work those outlets does outweighs the crap that they spill into the the public discourse because that's that's what's incentivized. And so I think to an extent there's almost no point in actually engaging with the objectivity debate with the people who are pushing it because they're not pushing it honestly. They're pushing it as a way to obscure the fact that they make their money the same way Mark Zuckerberg makes his money, which is by spreading fear, anger, and doubt. Yeah, yeah. That's the

the bad op-ed industrial complex. Like, I've been guilty of that, right? You see a fucking headline on social media and you're like, that's bullshit and that you click and read, right? I used to, like when I was a little baby journalist, engage with this and be like, that's bullshit because, and I either try and write about it somewhere or post you on social media. But I have come to realize that in doing that,

I'm doing exactly what they want me to do, which is continue sending people to their website to click on adverts and to make them money. So I think it's better that we do not do that. Yeah, that is the fundamental conceit of journalism right now. How it pays the bills is keeping you on that page. And the way it keeps you on that page is making you angry. There is like a model, I think.

And you see this like in community, small community newspapers right now. Like I guess outlets like left coast, right watch in California and Oregon, where like people genuinely by building trust and telling the truth, gain the support of their communities and are financed by them. But, I mean, the orders of magnitude and income difference are, like, they're not making Washington Post money over at left coast, right watch. I know this should be true. So, yeah, pretty fucked.

And it will only get worse, I think. Like, as we continue to slide into, like, the post-truth fascism world, I can't really see our legacy outlets do. much about it if all they ever going to do is strive for the middle ground on this well all right okay everybody all right you go of a good day in that world it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly

episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you. This technology is already solving so many cases.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, the saying it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence

rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leah Trettae. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you. you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.