Toward a humanistic turn for a more ethical journalism

Social science versus art – A manufactured crossroads

Philip Meyer’s (1973) book Precision Journalism promoted a dichotomous conception of journalism, essentially pitting a literary and artistic model – a model of humanism – against his then-pioneering model of journalism as social science. As described in C.W. Anderson’s (2018) Apostles of Certainty, Meyer’s conception, while initially rejected by journalism’s scions, gained traction as the tools of social scientific data analysis – namely computers – became affordable and accessible to newsrooms. In recent years, as computing has become ubiquitous and a positivist zeal has captured the field, the social scientific model of journalism has congealed into common sense. Journalism’s present-day advocates and futurists place increasing stock not in the narrative, human-driven storytelling that was a hallmark of reporting through much of the 19th and the 20th centuries (Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997), but rather in building, collecting, interpreting, and managing databases (Anderson et al., 2012; Fink and Anderson, 2015; Lewis, 2015; Weber et al., 2018).

On the opposite pole of Meyer’s constructed dichotomy stands James Carey, a cultural scholar of journalism and communication who argued that scientism was the wrong direction for journalism. Contemporaneously with computational journalism’s rise to hegemony, in the midst of the increasing social scientism of newsgathering, in the first issue of this journal, Carey (2000) put forth what had already become an anachronistic claim: that while journalism as an academic field might have taken refuge and developed in the social sciences, in part because of disrespect and snobbery from the humanities, it is in fact those humanities fields – history, philosophy, art, and literature – that constitute journalism’s true home.

In retrospect, Meyer and Carey’s competing conceptions of journalism’s epistemology might be considered a parallel to the 1920s ‘debate’ between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann over journalism’s role in society, with long-standing implications that will be re-litigated decades hence. Like Lippmann and Dewey, Carey and Meyer largely wrote past each other, articulating competing visions without substantially engaging. Unlike Lippmann and Dewey, however, Carey and Meyer are rarely brought into conversation in the journalism literature. This may be because in our current moment, Carey’s perspective has so clearly ebbed, and journalism’s data dive has proceeded with such headlong enthusiasm, that practitioners and researchers alike have effectively subordinated the notion of journalism as a medium for human thought, feeling, ethics, and spirit. In tune with a broader social emphasis on ‘positivist rationality’, this lopsided approach means ‘[t]he question of essence – the difference between the world as it is and as it could be – is reduced to the merely methodological task of collecting and classifying facts’ (Giroux, 1983, quoted in Denzin and Giardina, 2015: 15).

The past few decades of social scientific journalism have provided powerful insights into crime patterns, medical errors, political influence, and countless other social problems that need addressing (Lowrey and Hou, 2018), but the dichotomous exclusion of humanistic investigation has deprived us of the cultural and affective resources to meet these problems or even to openly discuss them (Glasser and Ettema, 1989). Important late 20th-century critiques holding that ‘value neutrality in the social sciences is impossible’ (Haan et al., 1983: xiii) and that ‘a heavy dose of scientific rationality has not rendered the populace at large invulnerable to irrational ideological and religious movements . . . [or] eliminated the use of propaganda and manipulation’ (Haan et al., 1983: 2) have gone unheeded in the journalistic field. We have demonstrated through exquisite social failure across multiple democracies that the dominant journalistic ethos of the late 20th and the early 21st centuries has not served humanity well (Lewis, 2019). Highly sophisticated US polling did not predict or satisfactorily explain the election of Donald Trump, but might have helped enable it by somnambulizing a confused and disgusted electorate (Patterson, 2016). Rigorous analysis of socially unjust and macro-economically dubious US tax code revisions (e.g. Matthews, 2017) did not discourage their passage.

Journalism at large pays insufficient attention to the concrete and somatic human relations that weave the affective web of distrust and disaffection ensnaring the political cultures of the United States, the United Kingdom, and other nations. By maintaining illusions of ‘the value-free fact’ (Durham, 1998: 121), we neglect the philosophical, intellectual, and performative questions that could foster moral clarity in an era of gaslighting and second-guessing. Conceiving journalism as art informed by the humanistic disciplines and everyday materialism – a notion largely rejected by Meyer – may also prove unequal to the regenerative needs of our age. But, we won’t know if we don’t try.

Social scientific journalism’s rise to hegemony

Meyer’s (2002) basic conception of the diverging paths for journalism in the late 20th century was preserved through the fourth edition of Precision Journalism, the book ‘widely acknowledged as the founding text of the CAR [computer-assisted reporting] and data journalism movements’ (Anderson, 2018: 111). Meyer’s introduction attributes emergence of the narrative ‘New Journalism’ movement of the 1960s to frustration over the limits of objectivity and notes how reporters like Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe incorporated ‘[t]he literary tools of fiction’ into their work, producing ‘journalistic products that are a joy to read’ (p. 4). The problem, writes Meyer, is that the process of gathering such ‘exquisite detail’ about real characters and events is so painstaking, and the tools of fiction so tempting, that ‘[t]he constraints of daily journalism will not support that level of effort’ and can lead to fabrication (p. 4). Here, Meyer (2002) establishes his dichotomous model of contemporary journalism:

Despite the problems, the new nonfiction remains an interesting effort at coping with information complexity and finding a way to communicate essential truth. It pushes journalism toward art. Its problem is that journalism requires discipline, and the discipline of art may not be the most appropriate kind. A better solution is to push journalism toward science, incorporating both the powerful data-gathering and -analysis tools of science and its disciplined search for verifiable truth. (p. 4)

As Anderson (2018) recounts, Meyer’s call for a social science–based journalism in the late 1960s was coolly received – at the beginning. Meyer struggled to find a publisher for Precision Journalism, as reviewers complained about the complexity and tedium of the processes he described and questioned the book’s practicality. At the time, there had been ‘little intersection . . . between journalism schools, journalists, social scientists, and communication researchers’ (p. 108). The key catalyst hastening the integration of journalism and social scientific inquiry, Anderson argues, is ‘the computer as a database’: ‘By drawing on the procedural speed that . . . computational practices made possible, journalism could raise its professional standards and more confidently deploy its own claims to certitude . . .’ (p. 111).

In the present day, journalism is ‘strongly influenced by social science discourse’ (Steensen, 2017: 41) – with heightened attention to data-driven reporting methods (Lewis, 2015; Weber et al., 2018), ‘an increasing tendency to portray events as abstract metrics and decreasing attention to personal, lived anecdotes’ (Lowrey and Hou, 2018: 1), and a movement to delegate parts of the newsgathering and sensemaking process to machines (Wu et al., 2019). Similarly, in academia, ‘The last few years have seen an explosion in data journalism-oriented scholarship’ (Fink and Anderson, 2015: 467). That actual technical and data innovations in certain countries or smaller US newspapers might not keep up with the high-concept rhetoric is implicitly presented as cause for concern (e.g. Fink and Anderson, 2015). Many startup news organizations, meanwhile, are built on the very premise of techno-scientific hegemony. The founder of such entrepreneurial ventures as BreakingNews.com and Factal, for instance, pitches journalism ‘not just through storytelling, but increasingly through technology services’ (Bergman, 2019). In general, consensus that data, computation, and algorithms are the future of journalism is rampant (Fink and Anderson, 2015). As Lewis (2015) writes, ‘[D]ata-centric phenomena, by some accounts, are poised to greatly influence, if not transform over time, some of the most fundamental aspects of news . . .’ (p. 321).

While methods differ between the long-standing qualitative style of political interpretation illustrated at the top of this article and sundry movements toward mechanistic, data-driven, and computational journalism that mark the contemporary era, they share a similar epistemological lineage traceable to journalism’s early 20th-century professionalization, its embrace of the ethos of objective reporting, and its late 20th-century adoption of the social science methods advocated by Meyer. As Barnhurst (2015) puts it, ‘[t]he objective account tries to dissociate news from its realist roots by accepting occurrences as inherent in the world and regarding them without flinching either morally or emotionally’ (p. 1249). The resulting journalistic practice is to convey the sense that everything is either calculated for political effect – even the cruelest forms of rhetoric – or calculable for the purposes of sorting and social legibility (Foucault, 1995 [1975]), with little room to spare for the imagination, the heart, or the unpredictable.

Anderson et al.’s (2012) manifesto on the future of ‘post-industrial’ journalism, for instance, focuses on technological innovations and new-media data gathering, but its general conception of news hearkens to the dominant 20th-century question of political winning and losing. In introducing the rise of the niche reporting outlet SCOTUSblog, the authors characterize the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold key aspects of the Affordable Care Act in this way: ‘Coming in an election year, with the incumbent president faced with having his policy centerpiece ruled unconstitutional, the significance of the decision went beyond health care: It was a major political story’ (p. 19, emphasis added). The implication, as with the present article’s opening anecdote, is that the ‘political story’ is the apex of journalistic endeavor.

Meanwhile, in discussing the future of algorithmic news-report generation pioneered by Narrative Science, Anderson et al. (2012) establish an implied hierarchy between the job of the human and of the machine: ‘Anywhere data are available in . . . digital format will be suitable for this type of [algorithmic] reporting, and anywhere there are no such data, like the local town hall meeting, will need a reporter to record the data’ (p. 26, emphasis added). Human beings, in this conception, are simply one step upstream in journalism’s data-processing function, recording data that can then be interpreted by machines. In the report, Narrative Science’s chief technology officer suggests that by producing algorithms that ‘think like journalists . . . the machine [will] come to the people – humanize the machine and make human insight at tremendous and outrageous scale’ (p. 26).

Even when describing what humans can do better than machines, Anderson ¹ et al. (2012) downplay humanistic traits. The authors focus on humans’ accountability – the ability to pinpoint someone to blame if something goes wrong – and their efficiency ‘at obtaining and disseminating certain types of information’ (p. 28). Somewhat discordantly, the paragraph on human ‘efficiency’ shouts out to the present study’s star cultural scholar, James Carey, suggesting that

Making phone calls to the White House or the school board, showing up at meetings and being receptive to feedback, sharing views and expressing doubt all make news more of the ‘drama’ that James Carey identified as central to the concept of a newspaper. These very personal and human activities mark journalism as a form of information performance rather than simply a dissemination of facts. (Anderson et al., 2012: 28)

The conception of human journalists as ‘information performers’ highlights the confusion around describing journalists’ primary work for society. Media scholar Jay Rosen, for instance, has argued that the common sense conception of journalists as storytellers is (or should be) a low priority:

I don’t know how our journalists came to see ‘storytelling’ as the heart of what they do, and ‘storyteller’ as a self-description. I can think of 4–5 elements of journalism more central than ‘story’. Truthtelling, grounding public conversation in fact, verification . . . listening. (Rosen, 2018)

The pull of story, Rosen argues in echoes of Meyer’s (2002) Precision Journalism, can lead to journalistic confirmation bias, or narrative overreaching, or reification of half-truths. These are all fair points of caution for how stories are conceived and told. But regardless of what role journalists believe they are fulfilling in any moment, they are always telling stories. The journalists who characterized Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford as a ‘risky’ political move were telling a story of politics as amoral, nihilistic, and driven purely by a quest for power. Journalists who merely dump searchable databases online for audiences to pick over are telling a story that decontextualized numbers convey incontrovertible truths. Many people encounter such stories and become cynical (e.g. Cappella and Jamieson, 1996). Many actively avoid such stories (Palmer and Toff, 2018). Some might construct their own counter-narratives. But no one encounters or avoids journalistic production as isolated information absent a co-constructed story (Perrin and Zampa, 2018). Journalistic work, in combination with other cultural forces, serves to co-construct narrative myths (of polarization or goodwill, danger or safety, prosperity or scarcity, etc.), that influence society (Gutsche and Salkin, 2017). That is to say, all journalistic content, be it a long lyrical profile or a series of tables and searchable databases, is ultimately filtered humanistically by audiences, who inevitably blend the content into their historical lives and moral outlooks (Sayer, 2011). Citizens, in fact, are far more likely than journalists to view news content from a moral frame than a conflict-oriented or strategic one (Neuman et al., 1992), which sets their interpretive activity at odds with journalistic presentation (Glasser and Ettema, 1989).

The culturally observed amoral nature of news reporting is supported by quantitative research. A content analysis of Dutch television media across genres found that in news and information content, “striv[ing] to inform its viewers in an unbiased manner . . . might translate into moral neutrality for most of the persons it presents” (Daalmans et al., 2017: 41). This moral neutrality in journalistic discourse parallels an observed decrease in the use of language concerning moral virtue in American books, suggesting ‘the attention paid to concepts of moral character and virtue has declined over the course of the twentieth century’ (Kesebir and Kesebir, 2012: 478). Amorality extends, as well, to research on normative journalism: Willnat et al.’s (2019) major survey of journalists and citizens on 15 role conceptions contributing to four major functions (interpreter, disseminator, adversarial, and populist mobilizer) contains no survey items explicitly linking moral consideration to journalistic function, thus pre-empting moral evaluation from possible discourse. The implications of this amorality have not gone unnoticed: A Democratic US senator, for instance, lamented the news media’s practice of ‘[w]atching a campaign dig up dirt with a foreign country and then covering the dirt instead of how nuts and immoral it is to do that in the first place’ (Schatz, 2019).

A discourse bereft of moral theorizing does not absolve the journalistic field of its role in shaping moral, historical, and aesthetic sensibilities, but it does cultivate a failure to recognize, acknowledge, or confront this role. The present essay is not so much about arguing that journalism should be more humanistic as it is about foregrounding journalism’s inherent humanistic impact and calling for better conceptual and practical alignment between journalism’s common sense epistemology and its actual work.

Carey’s journalism as a humanitarian pursuit

James Carey’s (2000) inaugural Journalism essay portrays the history of journalism education as the quest for an academic home. He argues that journalism programs were founded in the early 20th century as a means of taming, first, the radical instincts of the day’s journalists, who ‘lived in and romanced the low life of the city and had no aversion to socialism or trade unions and little illusion about the motives of those for whom they worked’ (p. 16); and, second, the more disruptive students of Midwestern universities, who tended to flock to student newspapers. Early 20th-century journalism dovetailed compatibly with early 20th century ‘humanistic social science . . . before American sociology, like the social sciences in general, became abstract and theoretical and severed its connection to space and place and the lives of real people’ (p. 18). Through the pressure of local newspaper editors and state press associations ‘seeking enhanced prestige for their humble enterprises’ (p. 19), journalism programs split off from the English departments through which they had emerged. The newly autonomous field, Carey argues, then sought its intellectual home in the humanities and law, but those fields rebuffed ‘this incursion of the low culture into the nobility of the professions and the most ancient of the academic crafts’ (p. 20). Instead, journalism got mixed up in the post-World War II acceleration and transformation of the science of communication, a newly totalizing field seeking ‘a science of control’ that Carey argues is intrinsically at odds with ‘a journalism of freedom’ (p. 21). The immersion of journalism into communication science ‘leveled journalism down to that of a signalling system’ (p. 21), consequently ‘reduce[ing] the rich thick corpus of journalism to the routine, the predictable, the ordinary, and the uninspired’ (p. 23), and stripping its role as ‘a particular kind of democratic practice’ (p. 22). The climax of Carey’s (2002) argument is this:

[T]he natural academic home of journalism is among the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. Journalism naturally belongs with political theory, which nurtures an understanding of democratic life and institutions[;] with literature, from which it derives a heightened awareness of language and expression and an understanding of narrative form; with philosophy, from which it can clarify its own moral foundations; with art, which enriches its capacity to imagine the unity of the visual world; with history, which forms the underlying stratum of its consciousness. (p. 22)

Carey’s (2000) argument built from a similar essay, originating in 1987 and republished in 1999, examining journalists’ uneasy relationship with formal codes of ethics. Carey suggests journalism’s struggle for a foothold among the professions originates with a failure to articulate a foundational purpose from which philosophers can build an ethical structure. Law has justice, medicine has health, Carey says. Journalists might claim ‘the Truth’, but Carey, citing Lippmann (1922), argues that term is both too general and too slippery to support a professional field. As foreshadowing of the scientism that ensnares contemporary journalistic practice, Carey paraphrases Lippmann’s argument ‘that news can approach the truth only when there is an adequate statistical machinery of record – when the world can be reduced to a table’ (Carey, 1999: 43). Carey laments that ‘[w]e have inherited and institutionalized Lippman’s conception of journalism’ (p. 51) – a conception favoring a society governed by public-marginalizing elites, held in check only by journalism’s ‘early warning system’ against malfeasance, a system ‘that keeps the public in a constant state of agitation or boredom’ (p. 51). He concludes that

We ought to think of journalism not as an outgrowth of science and the Enlightenment but more as an extension of poetry, the humanities, and political utopianism. . . . The ethics of journalism will not move forward until we actually re-think, re-describe, re-interpret what journalism is: not the science or information of our culture but instead its poetry and conversation. (Carey, 1999: 53–54)

What would journalism look like if we conceived it as poetry, as philosophy, as art? That is, what if journalists embraced their de facto role as co-constructors of a nation’s moral narrative, taking responsibility for the void that a century of ‘objective’ and largely cynical reporting has left in many Western social fabrics?

Journalists as moral interpreters

Let us look again at the chilling amorality at the heart of detached, social scientific, ‘objective’ political analysis in US public affairs reporting. Consider the meaning of ‘hard choices’ in this Washington Post story headlined ‘Trump administration seeks GOP support on border wall as senators confront hard choices’ (Kim and Werner, 2019). Does ‘choices’ refer to how members of the US Senate will wield their extraordinary power to either protect and assist or hinder and persecute the desperate and vulnerable migrants who arrive at the US border with Mexico? No. The story, rather, addresses senators’ personal political fortunes:

[M]any GOP senators weighing a vote on nullifying Trump’s national emergency are being confronted with a difficult choice: Buck their president and potentially draw the wrath of core Republican voters, or support Trump’s controversial declaration for a wall that remains unpopular with the broader public.

The potential consequences are more acute for GOP senators up for reelection next year, particularly those in Democratic-leaning or swing states who may need to create some distance from Trump yet could invite political challenges from the right should they vote for a disapproval resolution. (Kim and Werner, 2019)

Lip service is paid deep in the story to abstract moralistic concepts related to the actual situation at the border, with comments about a ‘humanitarian crisis’ and a call from a conservative advocacy group to ‘do the right thing’ for border security, but these ideas are not contested or developed. Questions of how senators could actually address humanitarian concerns or what ‘the right thing’ to do for migrants and concerned American citizens might be are not pertinent to the story.

Even many stories that purport to focus on questions of right and wrong, or the moral consequences of political actions for average people, revert quickly to formulaic tit-for-tat commentary and rhetorical gamesmanship rather than material repercussions of policy. When reporting on the ‘outrage’ of gun-control activists, for instance, the Washington Post (Thebault, 2019) seized not on the outrageous scale of gun-related carnage in the United States and the day-to-day psychological impact on public school students for whom hushed lockdown drills and sheltering in place are a shamefully traumatic routine. Sticking with the savvy political science frame, the Post focused on symbolic activity in a state legislative hearing room in its story ‘GOP lawmakers wore pearls while gun violence victims testified. Activists were outraged’. The headline pretty much tells the story, which originated from New Hampshire when an activist testifying for gun-control legislation posted photos of three (male) lawmakers wearing pearl necklaces:

The implication was clear, they [the activists] said: These politicians thought gun-control activists were ‘clutching their pearls’ in overwrought and self-righteous outrage – and, specifically, female outrage. (Thebault, 2019)

‘Objectively’ seeking the other side, the reporter, who could not get comment from the lawmakers themselves, includes a contorted rebuttal from a New Hampshire women’s gun-rights organization, suggesting that the pearls were worn not to mock gun-control advocates but to symbolically support women’s right to bear arms. The story then reproduces a series of obligatory social media condemnations from state and national politicians – a string of rhetorical pearl clutches that leaves the underlying moral issue of gun violence safely unexamined.

On the rare occasions when journalistic stories are framed as legitimate and nuanced questions of civic ethics, rather than as presumptive cases of pure instrumentalism, interesting things happen. Instead of ginning up automatic outrage or vindication, the reader is invited to question her assumptions and work through complex issues. For instance, a New York Times story (Paton and Zarate, 2019) about prisoners working for private companies is presented in terms of ethical ambiguity, with its subhead asking: ‘Brands are using prison labor to provide inmates with jobs and training. But is it possible – and ethical – to build a profitable fashion business behind bars?’ The story raises questions of exploitation and power imbalances but also explores opportunities for empowerment and meaningful work. Ultimately, the story, focusing on a single business working with women prisoners in Peru, tests a model for balancing prisoners’ rights and aspirations against capitalist demands.

In another example, a story in The New Yorker magazine about the ethical implications of indulging the fantasies of dementia patients invites an ambiguous response (MacFarquhar, 2018). The reader is first introduced to an assisted living community in which the hallways are decked out as porch fronts with street lamps, evoking the childhood neighborhoods of many residents. We witness acts of benevolent deception, as residents’ confusions are affirmed rather than corrected – they are escorted, for instance, to an imagined bus stop to wait for a ride ‘home’. The reader is guided for a time to view this approach as compassionate and clever in contrast with methods of repeatedly reminding people of their contextual truths: This isn’t your home, it’s not Sunday, your wife is dead. But the story then complicates the issue, raising important philosophical questions about preserving a dementia sufferer’s dignity, about whether someone with a choice would consent to permanent deception at the end of her life. Among the experts cited is philosopher and ethicist Sissela Bok:

It is easy to imagine a white lie as a kindness that does no harm, Bok believes, but most lies do harm to someone. Lying resembles violence, she says, because it can coerce people to act against their will. Even lying for benevolent reasons risks a coercive kind of paternalism, and can be corrupting, like any other unchecked exercise of power. (MacFarquhar, 2018)

These are thorny issues, left unresolved in the story, which means that they must be contemplated by the reader. Imagine if routine coverage of Donald Trump’s dishonesty dwelled in this realm of moral consequence, rather than on fact-checking questions targeting degrees of literal truth or falsity (see Cloud, 2018), or sociological reviews of who believes him and why, or political analysis of the electoral implications of enabling or combatting him.

Unfortunately, dominant journalistic ethos renders such questions in the political realm difficult to ask. Writing of the indirect methods investigative journalists rely on to summon citizen outrage without expressing any themselves, Glasser and Ettema (1989) note that ‘the ability of journalists to speak explicitly and forcefully of values is severely constrained’ (p. 14). Investigative reporters ‘are called upon not so much to maintain as to produce standards of moral judgment, but they are denied by the canons of objectivity the opportunity to explicitly make and, more important, analyze and defend such judgments’ (p. 3). Faced with this proscription, which Glasser and Ettema describe as ‘the paradox of the disengaged conscience’ (p. 3), reporters draw on several strategies to demonstrate that ‘transgressions are, in fact, transgressions’ (p. 2). Among these strategies is to focus on misconduct that violates the law, a bright line of codified behavioral limits that serves as ‘the most concrete and objective standard for the evaluation of questionable actions’ (p. 10) and releases journalists from promoting their own value judgments. This strategy helps explain the sudden journalistic distancing from links between the Trump administration and Russian election manipulators after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative report did not explicitly state that Trump had violated the law. While the report did not negate the numerous documented connections between Trump’s people and Russian manipulators, it undermined the legal ‘objective standard’ for misconduct and rendered reporters newly vulnerable to claims of bias if they asserted these connections.

Another strategy journalists use to highlight moral transgressions without implicating themselves in moral judgment is to fall back on social scientism. Glasser and Ettema (1989) note that, for Boston Globe reporters exposing pervasive racism in the city, ‘statistical comparisons provided another of the “rocks” to which they could cling in their assessment’ (p. 13). The quantitative measure – ‘turn[ing] moral claims into empirical claims’ (p. 13) – once again distances journalists from any qualitative responsibility in calling out immoral behavior.

Finally, investigative journalists seek to validate their reporting of transgressions by presenting factual accounts that, through their detailed depictions of transgressive behavior, appeal indirectly to people’s sense of common decency (Glasser and Ettema, 1989). That is, without asserting any judgment of their own, journalists report behavior they believe to be, on its face, transparently immoral, then step back to allow community members to fill the judgmental vacuum. This is a plausible reading of what the New York Times reporters were attempting in the story at the top of this article, recounting in exquisite detail how Trump mocked Christine Blasey Ford (Haberman and Baker, 2018). Such efforts are not devoid of emotional description – Wahl-Jorgensen (2013) has documented ‘a strategic ritual of emotionality’ in Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, and Haberman and Baker used affective images such as Trump’s voice ‘dripping with derision’. But the emotions deployed are not the journalists’, and their incorporation can be read as assuming a moral transgression without asserting one. Even more than investigative reporters, daily political journalists are expected to remain neutral about moral affairs (Glasser and Ettema, 1989).

By leaving moral judgment purely up to community response, journalists risk reinforcing or accelerating moral transgressions that do not widely resonate. Because journalists do not invest any moral stake in such issues themselves, ‘[W]hen stories do not summon outrage, journalism needs only to fall silent’ (Glasser and Ettema, 1989: 18) – a diagnosis that helps to explain the widespread normalization of Trump’s extraordinary rhetoric in the news media (Parks, 2019b). Ultimately,

[W]hile investigative journalism may function to conserve or to change the moral order, journalistic traditions and practices also function to undermine the rationality of that order by subverting critical discussion of it. The impoverishment of journalism’s moral resources may well equip it to preside most comfortably over the debasement and dissolution of values, more comfortably, certainly, than over their definition and development. (Glasser and Ettema, 1989: 17–18)

Conclusion

The purpose of this article has been to challenge the hegemonic epistemology that has driven journalism practice and much of its scholarly research over the past several decades – namely, a social scientific turn at the dawn of the desktop computer era that combined with long-standing conceptions of objectivity to produce increasingly sophisticated reporting that also appears increasingly detached from the people journalists are purported to serve, with trust in the news media peaking in the mid-1970s around the beginning of the precision journalism era and reaching a nadir in 2016 (Lewis, 2019: 45). Journalism’s emphasis on scientism has been explicitly opposed to more humanistic possibilities by influential figures such as Philip Meyer (1973), who placed journalistic art and science at dichotomous poles and helped to will the field in the direction of science. Opposing calls by scholars such as James Carey (e.g. 1999, 2000) to conceive journalism more as art and poetry have been swamped by technological advances that favor social science methods of data analysis and computation. But our conceptions of journalism need not be dichotomous. A prominent journalism textbook, published on the heels of Carey’s (2000) call to humanism, began its preface by asking ‘Is journalism a social science or a humanity?’ and concluding ‘The subject matter of most news stories falls squarely within the domain of the social sciences . . . Yet the practice of journalism has more to do with the humanities’ (Fedler et al., 2001: v). As Plaisance (2011: 109) sensibly suggests, ‘In the field of media ethics, energies committed to philosophical theorizing and social science cannot represent a zero-sum game. Each continually expands the horizons of the other’. Meyer himself suggested a hybrid ‘evidence-based narrative’ genre in 2012 (Anderson, 2018: 119).

To transcend the dichotomy that holds in conventional wisdom, journalists will need ethical leeway beyond the normative standards to which they are currently held, which require paradoxical contortions of engagement and detachment (Durham, 1998; Glasser and Ettema, 1989; Parks, 2019c) that lead citizens to the water of moral contemplation but don’t ask them to drink. While research documenting popular complaints against journalism repeatedly points to concerns about accuracy and neutrality, surveys also suggest that citizens do not particularly want the kind of interpretive analysis that journalists provide in public affairs stories – and they certainly think it is less important than journalists do (Willnat et al., 2019). Meanwhile, audiences are more inclined to apply moral frames to news than journalists are (Neuman et al., 1992) – a feat they must accomplish without reported moral or ethical context, which lie beyond journalists’ perceived mandate.

There is little evidence to date that journalists will ever satisfy publics when it comes to attaining some Platonic ideal of neutrality or objectivity suggested by Willnat et al.’s (2019) conclusions. We might instead consider the possibility that people are not as opposed to interpretation in general as they are to the dominant form of interpretation that facilitates cynical and instrumental political behavior at the expense of people’s basic humanity. At the very least, those publics who are turned off by the characterization of brutal mockery as ‘risky’ rather than ‘cruel’ might at some point warm up to journalistic interpretation that pursues what Sayer (2011: 2) calls ‘lay normativity’, or what (Hossain and Aucoin, 2018) have called an ‘ethics of care’, which ‘encourages more sustained and focused attention to the suffering and discrimination of vulnerable groups in society . . .’ (p. 202). As standpoint epistemology suggests, ‘If all reporting began from the perspective of those whose lives are impacted by events and by the reporting of events, the unrecognized weight of the socially dominant “insider” positions would be counterbalanced’ (Durham, 1998: 132). For Hossain and Aucoin, ‘creating dialogues on the basis of human values expands opportunities for great journalism’ (p. 207). Some nontraditional organizations, such as Hearken, have helped newsrooms pursue such dialogues with typically marginalized community members, producing generative results (e.g. Fields, 2018). And entities like Vox.com and Buzzfeed stake out values positions through their content in ways that have not been sufficiently foregrounded in contrast with agenda-setting legacy news organizations.

More widely adopting values-based orientations toward news does not mean mainstream journalists must necessarily become overt referees of moral action, although Glasser and Ettema (1989) suggest this kind of direct engagement might strengthen reporters’ authority. The brief case studies above of stories about the prison garment workers and proper care for dementia patients suggest that journalists need not provide definitive answers on moral questions. A good deal of work can be done simply by raising them.

To do so, to reorient themselves from detached, data-driven social scientists toward caring, storytelling humanists might change journalists’ relationship with publics in ways we cannot imagine in a world where basic reporting is so far removed from basic human truths.