Michael Schudson > Quotes

“Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person's statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the world, but consensually validated statements about it.”
― Michael Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers

“But into the first decades of the twentieth century, even at the New York Times, it was uncommon for journalists to see a sharp divide between facts and values. Yet the belief in objectivity is just this: the belief that one can and should separate facts from values. Facts, in this view, are assertions about the world open to independent validation. They stand beyond the distorting influences of any individual's personal preferences. Values, in this view, are an individual's conscious or unconscious preferences for what the world should be; they are seen as ultimately subjective and so without legitimate claim on other people. The belief in objectivity is a faith in "facts," a distrust of "values," and a commitment to their segregation.”
― Michael Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers

“Objectivity is a peculiar demand to make of institutions which, as business corporations, are dedicated first of all to economic survival. It is a peculiar demand to make of institutions which often, by tradition or explicit credo, are political organs. It is a peculiar demand to make of editors and reporters who have none of the professional apparatus which, for doctors or lawyers or scientists, is supposed to guarantee objectivity.”
― Michael Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers

“It should be apparent that the belief in objectivity in journalism, as in other professions, is not just a claim about what kind of knowledge is reliable. It is also a moral philosophy, a declaration of what kind of thinking one should engage in, in making moral decisions. It is, moreover, a political commitment, for it provides a guide to what groups one should acknowledge as relevant audiences for judging one's own thoughts and acts.”
― Michael Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers

“As professionalism in broadcast news manifested itself in shorter sound bites, professionalism in print produced longer stories.”
― Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News

“Riding an omnibus or street railway was a novel experience. For the first time in human history, people other than the very wealthy could, as a part of their daily life, ride in vehicles they were not responcible for driving. Their eyes and their hands were free; they could read on the bus. George Juergens has suggested that the World's change to a sensational style and layout was adapted to the needs of commuters: reading on the bus was difficult with the small print and large-sized pages of most papers. So the World reduced the size of the page, increased the size of headlines and the use of pictures, and developed the "lead" paragraph, in which all of the most vital information of a story would be concentrated.”
― Michael Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers

“What do you do with the market? You follow where others have led, asserting journalistic values against corporate assault, building formal economic structures that reduce dependence on Wall Street, developing a range of audience loyalties that enables you to bore or offend some of the audience some of the time without losing them.”
― Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News

“The media can profit from reporting scandal, but they can also lose, when their audience finds the reporting unpersuasive.”
― Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News

“In the twenties and thirties, many journalists observed with growing
anxiety that facts themselves, or what they had taken to be facts, could not be trusted. One response to this discomfiting view was the institutionalization in the daily paper of new genres of subjective reporting, like the political column. Another response turned the journalists' anxiety on its head and encouraged journalists to replace a simple faith in facts with an allegiance to rules and procedures created for a world in which even facts were in question. This was "objectivity." Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person's statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the world, but consensually validated statements about it a While naive empiricism has not disappeared in journalism and survives, to some extent, in all of us, after World War I it was subordinated to the more sophisticated ideal of "objectivity.”
― Michael Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers

“The moral division of labor between newspapers, then, may parallel the moral division of the human faculties between the more respectable faculties of abstraction and the less respectable feelings. People control themselves to read of politics in fine print; they let themselves go to read of murders or to look at drawings of celebrities. Information is a genre of self-denial, the story one of self-indulgence.”
― Michael Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers