Lies, Lies and Objective Journalism

Last week, after returning to the States from covering Egypt’s revolution, Anderson Cooper called out Hosni Mubarak and other politicians for lying to the media about their response and options to the uprising.

Soon, American establishment media were criticizing Cooper for taking taking sides in the conflict and losing his journalistic objectivity.

As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald writes:

Over the weekend, The Los Angeles‘ Times James Rainey mocked CNN’s Anderson Cooper for repeatedly using the word “lie” to describe the factually false statements of Egyptian leaders. Though Rainey ultimately concluded that “it’s hard to find fault with what Cooper had to say” — meaning that everything Cooper identified as a “lie” was, in fact, a “lie” — the bulk of Rainey’s column derided the CNN anchor for his statements… Rainey also suggested that the harsh denunciations of Mubarak’s false statements were merely part of “Cooper’s pronounced shift toward more opinion-making in recent months … trying to adopt the more commentary-heavy approach of [CNN’s] higher-rated competitors, Fox and MSNBC.” To Rainey, when a journalist calls a government lie a “lie,” that’s veering into “commentary-heavy opinion-making” rather than objective journalism

Rainey, as Greenwald notes, wasn’t the only figure with questions about Cooper’s objectivity. Media critic Howard Kurtz had this to say during a Q&A with Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey, “Now I think most journalists would agree with him, perhaps most Americans would agree with him. But should an anchor and correspondent be taking sides on this kind of story?”

Says Greenwald:

Rainey, Kurtz and Dickey all have this exactly backwards. Identifying lies told by powerful political leaders — and describing them as such — is what good journalists do, by definition. It’s the crux of adversarial journalism, of a “watchdog” press. “Objectivity” does not require refraining from pointing out the falsity of government claims. The opposite is true; objectivity requires that a journalist do exactly that: treat factually false statements as false. ”Objectivity” is breached not when a journalist calls a lie a “lie,” but when they refuse to do so, when they treat lies told by powerful political officials as though they’re viable, reasonable interpretations of subjective questions. The very idea that a journalist is engaged in ”opinion-making” or is “taking sides” by calling a lie a “lie” is ludicrous; the only “side” such a journalist is taking is with facts, with the truth. It’s when a journalist fails to identify a false statement as such that they are “taking sides” — they’re siding with those in power by deceitfully depicting their demonstrably false statements as something other than lies.

We couldn’t agree more, and recommend reading Greenwald’s full critique of the critique over at Salon.