The White Male Standard of Objectivity

After several years as one of The Washington Post’s lead reporters on racial injustice and police brutality, reporter Wesley Lowery found himself going toe-to-toe with the paper’s executive editor in 2019. The issue at hand was Lowery’s tweets.

Martin Baron threatened to fire Lowery for tweeting his personal opinions about race and journalism. Baron handed him a memo saying his conduct “damaged” the Washington Post’s journalistic integrity. Lowery defended himself, arguing that he was joining the “debate about a topic I cover directly — race and racism in America.”

Lowery ultimately left the Post in 2020, and he remains a strong voice in the current reckoning against objectivity.

As cisgender white men continue to dominate the leadership of newsrooms across the country, they also continue to uphold the cisgender white male standard of objectivity that dominates journalism today. Even as newsrooms are slowly diversifying, the objectivity standard has remained the same.

This standard forces journalists of color, LGBTQ journalists, and female journalists to play “both sides” journalism while reporting stories that threaten their humanity. Any discernable bias in a social media post or personal statement can result in removal from coverage or even firing.

In the last year, multiple newsrooms have silenced and occasionally fired journalists for failing to uphold this standard of objectivity. In January, The New York Times terminated the employment of freelance editor Lauren Wolfe over an inauguration day tweet that showed apparent bias. Firing Wolfe, a queer woman, over her tweet marks another example of journalists with marginalized identities falling victim to the white male standard of objectivity.

After Wolfe's firing, Lowery tweeted in support of her. He rightfully criticized newsrooms for firing reporters to protect their institution against bad faith attacks over bias.

During the Black Lives Matter Protests in June, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette barred one of their only Black journalists, Alexis Johnson, from protest coverage because the newspaper said one of her tweets showed bias.

The Post-Gazette lost an opportunity to offer more nuanced reporting of the protests and racial injustice because they valued the perception of objectivity above truly accurate and fair coverage.

Johnson sued the newspaper in June. She alleged that the Post-Gazette was engaging in racial discrimination and illegal retaliation.

In each of these instances, the newsrooms prioritized the perceived notion of objectivity over employing diverse voices that reflect the communities on which they report.

In his prediction for journalism diversity in 2021, Gabe Schneider predicts that newsroom leaders will remain unable to “reckon with the fact that they write for and to the comfort of wealthy white American cisgender men.” If leaders continue to cater their reporting to white sensibilities, the reliance on objectivity will likely remain. This will continually force oppressed people’s voices out of the narrative for being too close to the story.

In spite of the odds, marginalized journalists have a history of pushing journalism forward, and there’s hope that they will be able to do that once again. Wesley Lowery in particular shows no signs of stopping this fight.