Objectivity in the media revolves around highlighting and criticizing important information and facts that are relevant to the audience. Therefore, acknowledging the need to use neutral language and avoiding writing stories that characterize institutions or people as positive or negative is critical in the presented content. As a transgender and a reporter, I feel journalists should fight to ensure truth-telling and power in the media is accounted for when presenting information that tells the truth in a neutral language. Defining and maintaining a sense of purpose is essential since it is the media’s job to tell diverse stories in a manner that does not present positivity or negativity about any community.
For long, neutrality in the media has been an impossible thing to admit, especially among members of the LGBTQ. The opportunity to pretend that members of this community can be neutral, to say the least, has never existed. For many years, the media has picked up stories about LGBTQ members; however, the nature of the debates involving this group has been whether they should be allowed to participate and live in the same communities. Moreover, the stories picked by the media, specifically about transgender people, are about whether they should use public facilities and expect not to be harassed, fired, or even killed. People should be central or neutral when debates are raised about their humanity. Whether transgender or a member of the LGBTQ community, the notion that these individuals do not have a right to exist is falsified.
Similarly, African Americans are expected to give credence to both sides of a dispute with a white supremacist, an individual that holds a morally and unscientific perspective on the basic nature of human beings. The centrality of what is considered neutral in the media can and indeed shifts. When one looks at the history of journalism, a great understanding comes out of how centralism is a marketing tactic used to reach a broader audience than actual neutrality. Many journalists that tell the truth in key historical moments have been considered members of the opposition, outliers (Perkins). As the norms of governments shift towards a post-fact framework, investing in factual news no longer remains neutral.
In the media, the people making editorial decisions influence the neutrality of the published information. Therefore, editors must include members of the marginalized communities in the editorial team to shape the tabled stories. People crave uniqueness, honesty, and the depth of presenting actual perspective to the covered content. The audience expects journalists to be truthful and fair, not machines (Perkins). It does not require journalists to be male and white, as this creates a situation where status quo bias is created through male power and white racism.
Moreover, journalists should check facts and tell the truth. Truth-telling is a job that is not going away; however, it is getting complicated in a world filled with unknown datasets, federal leaders, and liars (Perkins). The dominance of the Facebook algorithm and a changing but also an opaque market for online news brings out the foamiest of fluff to the top, which confuses even the savviest of consumers. As such, as journalists, checking the facts, telling the truth, and holding the line without pretending that an ethical basis does not exist is essential in an ever-shifting center of neutrality.
Three premises, checking facts and telling the truth, editorial decisions, and neutrality, have been argued relative to the issue of objectivity in the media. The premises’ relevance to the established conclusion is that they contribute to the understanding and significance of the need for bias-free content. From the premise journalists should check facts and tell the truth, establishing reports that rely on complicated datasets makes it challenging even for the savviest of consumers to determine facts from fiction. The editorial decision premise shows that bias can only be minimized when members of the marginalized communities are involved in deciding the information presented. The third premise shows that neutrality has long been sidelined due to social constructivism that defines what gender and race should be involved in content presentation.
The knowledge associated with the journalists should check facts and tell the truth makes it acceptable since it informs the audience of the significance of presenting well-informed content. The same goes for the second and third premises due to the realization that journalists must move beyond the existing social constructs to present neutral information regardless of gender and race. Based on the significance of the premises, the inference is adequate. The importance of the premises and how they contribute to the thesis is underpinned by the need to maintain the need to tell diverse and bias-free stories. When journalists transition from the traditional to a more modern way of presenting information, they must factor in every audience and question the relevance of the published content. Therefore, a modern presentation of information must consider that the world has grown into a more diverse community, and every reader must not be made to feel sidelined by the content.
Work Cited
Perkins, Adam. “The Scientific Importance of Free Speech.” Quillette. 2018.