Is objectivity in journalism possible?

Summary: Objectivity as a state of mind, a reporter with no views, is impossible, and nobody serious ever proposed it. Objectivity as a method, where the reporter tests every claim, shows the evidence, and labels the opinion, is possible and is what most readers mean when they say they want news without a point of view. The argument over the word has confused the two for a century, and the way out for a reader is to stop asking whether the journalist is objective and start checking whether the story shows its method.

Ask whether a journalist can be objective and the honest answer is no. Every reporter arrives at a story with a history, a set of assumptions, and a limited number of hours, and the choice of which story to cover is a judgment before a word is written. Ask instead whether a journalist can test a claim before printing it, name the source, show the document, and tell you which part is opinion, and the answer is yes, every day, in thousands of newsrooms. The first question is about the person, and the second is about the work. The debate about objectivity has spent 100 years asking the first question and answering the second.

What the word was supposed to mean

Objectivity entered American journalism as a method, not a personality. In 1920, Walter Lippmann, the American journalist and political writer, published Liberty and the News. The book, now free to read, described the raw material arriving in a newsroom as "an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears." It called for "a professional training in journalism in which the ideal of objective testimony is cardinal." His case was political: "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies." He didn't ask reporters to have no opinions. He asked them to exercise what he called "the highest of the scientific virtues," meaning the discipline of checking what you want to be true as hard as what you don't.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, 2 veteran American editors, made the same point in their book The Elements of Journalism, in a line the journalist Alex S. Jones quoted in Nieman Reports, the Harvard journalism magazine: "In the original concept, in other words, the method is objective, not the journalist." Objectivity, in that sense, is a set of habits. Verify before publishing. Attribute. Seek the person the story is about. Separate what you know from what you suspect. Show the reader enough to check your work. A reporter with strong views can do all of that, and a reporter with none can skip all of it.

The best-known American code of journalism ethics doesn't use the word at all. The Society of Professional Journalists, a US association of journalists, has a Code of Ethics, revised on October 4, 2026, after 93% of voting members approved the first changes since 2014. It rests on 4 principles: Seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. "Objective" and "objectivity" appear nowhere in it. What it asks for instead is method: "Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work before releasing it," "Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived," and "Label opinion journalism and news analysis."

How the word turned into its opposite

Somewhere between Lippmann and now, objectivity stopped describing the reporter's method and started describing the reporter's posture. The posture is the one Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, named in 2010 as the View from Nowhere, which he defined as "a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer." Under that version, the reporter's job is to appear to have no position, which in practice means quoting one side, quoting the other, and declining to say which one the evidence supports. The method tests claims. The posture balances them.

That shift is why the word is now under attack from inside the profession. In January 2023, Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post, and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News, published Beyond Objectivity, a report built on more than 75 interviews with news leaders and journalists. Their recommendation to newsrooms was to stop using the word and to replace it with 6 practices, among them "move beyond accuracy to truth," "focus on essential original reporting," and "show their work as an integral part of the journalism process." Read the list and notice what it is: Lippmann's method, under a different name. The report's title rejects the word, and its contents restore the thing.

Pew Research Center, the nonpartisan Washington research organization, measured the gap between journalists and their readers on exactly this point. In a 2022 survey of 11,889 American journalists, 55% said that every side does not always deserve equal coverage in the news. Among the public, 22% agreed, and 76% said journalists should always strive to give all sides equal coverage. The two groups aren't disagreeing about honesty. They're disagreeing about which version of objectivity they mean. Journalists, who have watched equal coverage give equal weight to a documented fact and a denial of it, are rejecting the posture. Readers, who have watched reporters pick sides, are asking for the method.

What readers say they want

The evidence that readers want the method rather than a point of view is consistent across countries and years. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, in a chapter of its 2026 Digital News Report by Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen published on June 16, 2026, found that 45% of respondents across its 48 markets prefer news from sources that don't have a particular point of view. That is twice the 22% who prefer sources that share their point of view, and 3 times the 15% who prefer sources that challenge it. Across the 40 markets asked the same question in 2020, the report describes the figures as "strikingly stable," with the only clear movement a slight decline in the share who want news that agrees with them.

What has moved is trust, and in the United States it has moved a long way down. Gallup, the American polling company, in a poll of 1,000 adults fielded September 1 to 17, 2026, found that 33% of Americans have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in newspapers, television, and radio "to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly." That is up from a record low of 28% in 2025 and down from 72% when Gallup asked the same question in 1976. An equal 33% now say they have no confidence at all. Among Republicans the figure is 22%, among independents 31%, and among Democrats 50%. The question Gallup asks is a question about method, "fully, accurately, and fairly," and 2 out of 3 Americans answer that the method isn't being followed.

The objection: The method hides the choices

The strongest objection to method objectivity is that the method doesn't go deep enough. Before any claim is tested, someone decided which story to cover, which sources to call, which fact to put in the first sentence, and which to leave for the 14th. Those choices are judgments, the judgments are shaped by who the journalist is, and no amount of attribution makes them disappear. Worse, the method's own rules produced the posture: "Get both sides" is a method, and it gave decades of equal space to claims the evidence had already settled. On this view, "the method is objective" is a comforting phrase for a process that is subjective at every step that matters.

The first half is right. Selection is judgment, and it is the part of journalism that cannot be reduced to a checklist. That is the job. An editor who chooses 6 stories out of a day's thousands is exercising judgment, and pretending otherwise would be the View from Nowhere all over again. Where the objection goes wrong is in concluding that judgment and method are rivals. The method's purpose was never to remove judgment. It was to make judgment checkable: To put the source under the claim, the document behind the number, and the label on the opinion, so a reader can see what was decided and decide whether to trust it. "Get both sides" failed because it was the posture dressed as a method, a rule for appearing fair rather than for finding out. The 55% of journalists in Pew's survey who say not every side deserves equal coverage aren't abandoning the method. They are applying it, since weighing claims by evidence is what the method requires and giving them equal space is what the posture requires. The distinction we drew in our article on misinformation applies here too: What separates a careful report from a careless one is whether the claim was tested, not whether the reporter had a view about it.

How to tell whether a story shows its method

Each of these checks looks at something on the page. None requires you to know the reporter's politics, which you usually can't.

1. Find the sources, and count the named ones. A story built on method attributes its claims to people with names and titles, documents you could request, or data you could look up. "Critics say" and "sources familiar with" are not sources. Some anonymity is necessary and honest reporting says why it was granted; A story in which no claim can be traced to anyone shows no method at all.

2. Find the label. The SPJ code's instruction is to "Label opinion journalism and news analysis." Look at the section name in the URL and the heading above the headline. A piece that argues a conclusion and sits in the news section is a posture problem. A piece that argues a conclusion and says "Opinion" at the top is doing exactly what it should.

3. Check whether the strongest fact against the frame is in the story. Not a quote from the other side, which is the posture, but the fact. If a story about a policy's success includes the best available number against it, and says why the writer still reads the evidence the way they do, the method is at work. If it includes only a denial from a spokesperson, the method has been replaced by balance.

4. Read the verbs. "Said" is a report. "Claimed," "admitted," "insisted," and "slammed" are verdicts attached to a report. One loaded verb is a style choice. A pattern of them, all pointing the same way, tells you the frame was decided before the reporting.

5. Look for the sentence about what couldn't be confirmed. Careful stories say "could not independently verify," "did not respond to a request for comment," or "the document does not show." Those sentences are the method made visible, because they mark the border of what the reporter knows.

6. Read the same story from two outlets with different owners. The facts both report are the method's output. The facts only one reports are where selection shows, and that is the part you should look up yourself. Wire copy, as we explained in our article on wire services, is often the clearest example of method journalism, because it has to be publishable by newspapers that agree on nothing else.

What these checks can't tell you is whether the reporter is objective, because no reader can see inside another person's head. They can tell you whether the story was built so that you don't have to.

Our weekday brief at informed.now is a judgment made in public: Editors choose 6 stories a day from the whole day's news, and each summary cites the strongest source behind it, so the choice is ours and the checking is yours. The method above works on the brief and on everything else you read, which is the point of a method rather than a promise.

The next time someone tells you a news outlet isn't objective, ask them which kind they mean. If they mean the reporters have views, they're right about every outlet that has ever existed. If they mean the stories don't name their sources, don't label their opinions, and don't say what couldn't be confirmed, open one and check, because those 3 things are visible on the page, and they're the only version of objectivity that was ever possible.