Taking Journalism Seriously: “Objectivity” as a Partisan Cause by Richard H. Reeb, Jr.

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Review of Taking Journalism Seriously
By Richard L. Williams
Glendale College, Professor of Government

Professor Richard Reeb’s work, Taking Journalism Seriously, offers its reader a great return on the time which one must invest in the serious study which this critical and most unconventional or ground-breaking analysis of the American press or media demands. Reeb’s analysis of the journalistic enterprise stems from the Founders’ (Jefferson’s, Madison’s and Hamilton’s) premise that the media together constitute a political institution which serves a necessary political function; and which must be judged according to the extent to which it either impedes or facilitates the public’s education in what Jefferson called “the true facts and sound principles” of our form of government. Judged in this light, the core problem of our media is not—as many have argued—their lack of what is called “objectivity”. Rather, as Reeb shows, their core problem is their partisanship in the service of unsound or false political principles. In short, the media's core problem lies in the belief that through schooling the public in their “transcendent” discoveries: to wit, that one can properly study politics only by studying it “scientifically” and that one can truly understand political speech only by understanding it “historically”; journalism will be able to lead all of us out of the “cave” of the harsh realities of the contentions between passionate and interested political partisans, and into the “sunlight” of a world from which those journalistic “solvents” have removed all partisan contentions, conflicts, struggles and wars.

As Reeb shows through his careful study of Walter Lippman, the journalistic estrangement from final causation, that is, from the purposes, ends, aims or objectives of political life, necessarily falsifies political phenomena. After all, in politics more comprehensively than in anything else, every art and every activity aims at the attainment of some good, and categorically to deny the existence of that aiming point—as “objective” journalism does—is necessarily to distort the political phenomena being covered. Similarly, Reeb shows that journalistic “historicism,” (or the dogmatic assumption that all expressions of “values” are and can be nothing more than the reflections of the interests, times and places out of which they arose), necessarily distorts the political phenomena; leading as well to such a condescending journalistic neutrality or indifference to fundamental political quarrels that the grounds of the freedom of both the journalist and the citizen become obscured. Finally, and as is appropriate to a work which aims at the reconstitution of our media, Taking Journalism Seriously returns us to our Founders and to their most instructive efforts to constitute a “fourth estate” which is devotion to its proper work of reporting the true facts and more so articulating the sound principles of the public’s business.