The Long Road to Objectivity and Back Again — the Kinds of Truth We Get in Journalism

Abstract

When we pick up a newspaper we bring to the task of reading it a series of habitualised assumptions — that the events it describes will have actually occurred, that those to which it ascribes the greatest importance are likely to commend themselves to us as being worthy of priority, that information concerning goods for sale will be presented differently from other information, that information placed in specific categories will indeed belong to them (sports, business, entertainment, stock prices) and that the whole of what appears will have passed through a process of collection, checking, arrangement and general consideration consistent with the previous practice of the paper. In other words we approach the newspaper product having absorbed certain routines of comprehension, accepting the special codes of the newspaper genre; these are presumed to follow the routines and codes used by the journalists and compositors who create the paper. This might make the newspaper sound a very settled product, unchanging in its intentions and presuppositions; in fact, it is in a permanent state of flux, its working practices and controlling mechanisms constantly shifting with the altering varieties of news demanded of it, the altering fashions and interests (which it seeks both to record and foster) of its audience, and the altering techniques and sub-departments of the profession of journalism itself.

Published originally as chapter 1 in James Curran (ed.), Newspaper History: studies in the evolution of the British Press (London: Constable, 1978). ©Acton Society Press Group.