Should Journalism be Amoral?

George Orwell was not a peace journalist; he was a proper journalist!

Jean Seaton, professor of media history at the university of Westminster and official historian for the BBC, hurled the comment from her seat in the audience onto the stage, interrupting the current speaker, Richard Keeble, professor at the University of Lincoln’s school of journalism. Keeble’s passing claim on George Orwell in last Saturday’s OxPeace conference on “Media in Conflict and Peace building” (recordings of the talks will shortly be available on OUCS iTunes) visibly (and audibly) upset Seaton, who was present also as a speaker.

Why did Seaton treat the title of “peace journalist” as an insult?

In the brief Q & A that followed, Seaton explained that Orwell was a proper journalist because he constantly tried to undermine his own assumptions when investigating a story, to be as objective as possible, to pursue and depict the truth, no matter what that truth; what he was not doing was journalism pre-devoted to a particular ideology like peace. To Seaton, this was the role of proper journalism, to report objectively for (as she articulated in her talk earlier that day) journalism should be an “amoral” process.

By “amoral,” I do not think that Seaton meant that journalism should have no moral code – indeed as another panelists responded later in the conference, she clearly supported a morality in which journalism should care about the objective truth – but that moral considerations should not apply to the practice of journalism. Journalism viewed as a tool for promoting peace (a preconceived moral goal), therefore, would be improper journalism. If the objective truth happens to promote peace building, great, but if it promotes further violence, so be it as long it is the objective truth.

This debate about what journalism should and should not be – a moral debate – ran beneath the conference like the plumbing beneath New York: not given enough attention but vitally important. So perhaps we can continue the discussion here: Can journalism be amoral?

The ideal of the impartial, objective journalist in search of the Truth with a capital T, particularly an analogy of journalism as a “clear lens” surfaced and resurfaced. The emerging research in linguistics, psychology and neuroscience on the impact of framing, priming, and unconscious bias on how we perceive the world and how we communicate seriously calls into question whether a “clear lens” can ever be attained. But for the sake of argument, let us grant that this same research could allow journalists to notice and account for these effects to act as lenses without distortion; then can journalism be amoral?

Any photographer will tell you that even with a clear lens what is important is where you point that lens. Time, attention, and money are limited resources, and decisions on how to expend those resources are often moral ones. In medical ethics, this is well known: which procedures to fund in socialized healthcare programs like the NHS. In journalism too, not all stories, for practical reasons, can be covered. Which to cover and how many resources to spend on them (source verifying, plane tickets, journal space etc) are moral decisions from which the profession cannot and should not escape. Examples of stories that should be told but are not told are numerous. Arijit Sen of the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford drew light to the conflict in Nagaland in northeastern India in which 1000 people die yearly and have been doing so for the past 60 years, but reporting on this conflict is nonexistent compared to Kashmir.

The issue of money exerting control over the stories told came up briefly in the context of the financial hit that some news stations in the USA took when trying to report more critically on the (at that time) new war in Iraq. What the people wanted to hear was not a critique of their government’s decision and the horrors of war, but a one-sided story that justified it and made them feel secure. Interestingly however, some journalists at the conference argued that the responsibility lies with the readers to demand the critical stories, to demand the ethically important news. If this were to happen, then it sure would make it practically easier for the media to cover ethically important stories in a critical and balance way, but I cannot see how the existence or non-existence of a market for these stories makes one wit of difference about whether the media should cover them. analogously, coffee growers and shoe-factory workers should be paid a living wage and work in safe conditions regardless about whether there is a market for fair trade coffee or sweat-shop-free shoes. The existence of a market sure makes it easier for coffee and shoe companies to act morally, but its absence does not mean that the moral duty ceases to exist.

It is certainly true, however, that journalism is a business and without making money, NO news will be covered. So in order to maximize the number of stories told that should be told, a company can’t tell only stories that will not make money. The question, then, is how strong is this responsibility when weighed against money? Does the press have the responsibility to make only enough money to stay afloat?

So in light of the normative choices of resource allocation and the difficulties of creating a “clear lens,” it seems unlikely that journalism can objectively claim to be “amoral.” And if this is the case, isn’t an emphasis on the impartial objectivity of journalism as anything other than and ideal misleading and, potentially, damaging? A young man I shared coffee with at the conference made the reasonable suggestion that it would be a great step if journalism would cast off the false guise of the ideal be clearer about where it is coming from; then people could interpret the stories with the proper weight.

But if the ideal remains an ideal, and the media is necessarily biased in some way, wouldn’t a bias towards peace building and conflict resolution be a decent bias to choose?