Gaye Tuchman (1972) elucidated journalists’ notion on objectivity in reporting news by acknowledging newsmen unable to attain “objectivity”.
Although they do not achieve “objectivity”, they still claim it through practicing the four rituals –routine procedures that have relatively little or only tangential relevance in the end sought (Hughes, 1964,).
Tuchman grants that “objectivity” is not really achieved by journalist, but instead, they believe they could be “objective” by self-detachment, impartiality, and display of impersonal mannerisms in presenting the news.
There are four rituals journalists practice aside from verifying data. They present conflicting possibilities, present supporting evidences, judiciously use quotation marks, and structuring information in an appropriate sequence.
These practices, according to Hughes (1964, pp. 94-98), were “developed ritualized procedures to protect themselves from blame.” Tuchman (1964) stated that attempts to “objectivity” are not “objectivity” itself.
Exemplified attempts to “objectivity” will be unable to achieve full essence of objectivity for several reasons on each ritual.
First, it will be explained on the presentation of conflicting possibilities.
It has been a habit of a newsman to take another angle for an event such as finding another source to verify the information of your original source to prove that one is unbiased. A good example is of a bus bombing. Journalists will cover all the probable reasons why the bus was bombed. But, this ritual is arguable because sources are not really reliable as they appear to be so, and could have some hidden political agenda upon their statements.
Second, the presentations of evidences are not really “objective”.
Tuchman (1972) states that evidences are commonly accepted as truth. And newsmen kept asserting “facts speak for themselves,” whereas they do not.
There are proper counter-arguments with the following statements.
One, not all accepted truth by the public is really the “truth”, what they know are the information given by sources of knowledge (media, schools, government) and not all the information imparted to them are legitimate truth.
And two, “facts” are empirical data, and they CLEARLY DO NOT speak for themselves. Facts were analyzed and interpreted by newsmen; they make the facts strong points and angles on their judgment, but clearly, facts are just facts and it is up to humans to analyze them.
Third, newsmen inhibit judicious use of quotation marks. The use of quotations –if not for attribution, is to implicate that the quoted statements or words are questionable. But, it is not the “objectivity” itself; at times, newsmen deceive their editors by following a process associated with objectivity.
Lastly, it is the structuring information in an appropriate sequence. Since constructing a powerful and effective lead requires “professional acumen”, a newsman must consider competing interesting facts or important facts for his lead. It was also shown that “news analyses” –news features where in reporters interpret the facts they have gathered, that news analyses are of some importance. Despite of that, using “professional acumen” does not justify a lead to be objective.
News analyses were just basically interpretations and not facts.
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