mass-communication-theory

objectivity rituals
In news production
research, the
term for professional
practices
designed to ensure
objectivity
that are implicitly
biased toward
support of the
status quo
Chapter 10 Media and Society: The Role of Media in the Social World 305
to explain disasters and to challenge movement members. Elites are presented
as authoritative, rational, knowledgeable people who are effectively coping
with threats. They can be trusted to bring things back to normal. If there is a
problem with aircraft technology, it will be repaired—the FAA has the flight
recorder and will pinpoint the cause of the crash as soon as possible. If movements
make legitimate demands, they will be satisfied—the governor has
announced that he is forming a blue-ribbon commission to study the problem.
Threat of terrorist attack? Don’t worry, the government will protect you (just
don’t ask too many questions).
There are several reasons for this tendency. One is availability; reporters can
easily find officials. Another is the need to maintain access to valued news sources
(more on this later). A third reason for the normalization resides in the political
economy of the news business (Chapter 8), and it is evident in reporter Evan
Thomas’s Newsweek 2009 cover story on why liberals were upset with President
Obama’s handling of the economic recovery. He wrote, “If you are of the establishment
persuasion (and I am), reading [these criticisms] makes you uneasy…. By definition,
establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the
ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are.
Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and
useful, stabilizing and reassuring” (p. 22).
Gaye Tuchman (1978) provides a good example of news production research.
She studied how the values held by journalists influence news, even when they
make considerable effort to guard against that influence. She observed journalists
as they covered social movements and concluded that production practices were
implicitly biased toward support of the status quo. She found that reporters engage
in objectivity rituals—they have set procedures for producing unbiased news stories
that actually introduce bias.
For example, when leaders of a controversial movement were interviewed, their
statements were never allowed to stand alone. Journalists routinely attempted to
“balance” these statements by reporting the views of authorities who opposed the
movements. Reporters frequently selected the most unusual or controversial statements
made by movement leaders and contrasted these with the more conventional
views of mainstream group leaders. Reporters made little effort to understand the
overall philosophy of the movement. Lacking understanding, they inevitably took
statements out of context and misrepresented movement ideals. Thus, though
reporters never explicitly expressed negative views about these groups, their
lack of understanding, their casual methods for selecting quotes, and their use of
elite sources led to stories harmful to the movements they covered. Tuchman’s
arguments have been corroborated by Mark Fishman (1980) and Todd Gitlin
(1980).
Environmental news, especially coverage of climate change, offers another
example of how these objectivity rituals routinely support the status quo. Whereas
the world scientific community overwhelmingly believes in global warming and the
greenhouse effect, with some estimates as high as 95 percent of all scientists working
in climatology, astronomy, and meteorology accepting these phenomena as
scientific fact, when they are covered in the popular press, the issue is presented
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