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Leaders of prominent news organizations are now claiming that objectivity in news reporting is “racist”

 by Edward Ulrich, February 2, 2023




From left to right: The former CBS News President Andrew Heyward (from Flickr), the former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. (from Flickr), and Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle.

The definition of “objective” from the American Heritage Dictionary:  1. Existing independent of or external to the mind; actual or real.  2. Based on observable phenomena; empirical.  3. Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices: synonym: fair.


Following is a summary of a Daily Caller article that I found on the Information Liberation website:

A former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and the former CBS News President Andrew Heyward interviewed over 75 media leaders for a report about how how the industry views the concept of “objectivity,” where they themselves also ridiculously argued that journalistic objectivity was either unrealistic or undesirable, and that journalists should instead include their own beliefs, bias, and experiences to convey their own “truth,” especially when it comes to “woke” topics.

Downie Jr. wrote the following in the report, saying that since White men were objective and reported on all sides of issues as reporters in the past, then it goes to reason that doing so must be racist:

“[I]ncreasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality.  They point out that the standard was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world.  They believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘bothsidesism' in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects.  And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, [“Journalists of color” and “LGBTQ+” journalists] feel [objectivity] negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”



What we found has convinced us that truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever ‘objectivity’ once meant to produce more trustworthy news.

… This appears to be the beginning of another generational shift in American journalism.


Many of the journalists interviewed in the report shared the same sort of a mentality, essentially saying that journalists should be “woke activists” instead of “objective,” such as Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle who said “objectively has got to go.”

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