François Cardinal regularly mentions his doubts and concerns about the emergence of a journalism that he describes as “militant” in his posts “In the notebook of the assistant editor”. This was again the case last Sunday in the article “You want to change the world…”.
Cardinal recounts having participated in the most recent congress of the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec, where, to his “great astonishment”, many people questioned the principle of impartiality. “I don’t remember a convention of journalists where impartiality was so questioned,” he adds.
In fact, the journalistic profession’s desire for impartiality is the object of increasingly numerous and hard-hitting criticisms, including from within the profession itself. Never mind, Cardinal persists and signs: while “the journalist is neutral” and “seeks the truth”, the activist “defends a position” and “seeks to convince”.
However, it is quite possible to successfully combine the quest for information or knowledge and social engagement.
The facts are there to prove it: there are countless examples of people who have advanced knowledge while openly displaying their political commitment.
This is particularly the case in the social sciences, a field that I know well.
The work A People’s History of the United States, by the democratic socialist historian Howard Zinn, does not hide his bias in favor of the resistance fighters and those forgotten by “official” history. The book is now a must.
It is openly anti-racist thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon and Bell Hooks, who have contributed most to the understanding of racist oppression.
In Quebec, many universities have a department of feminist studies, whose research greatly benefits our understanding of gender relations in society.
Even in the field of journalism, there are also many cases of exemplary work carried out by individuals openly identifying with certain ideals.
Ida B. Wells, ex-slave and African-American suffragist, is known for her courageous reporting on lynchings in the southern United States in the late 19th century.e century. At the beginning of the XXe century, the socialist Upton Sinclair published The jungle, an unparalleled survey of the working conditions of people working in Chicago slaughterhouses. The work Farewell to Catalonia by George Orwell is hailed as one of the best accounts of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Yet Orwell was an anti-fascist fighter in that war!
Also in our time, many journalists are doing remarkable work without hiding their values and their commitment. In France, Mediapart and Reporterre produce high-quality committed journalism, as does the Guardian in Great Britain. In the United States, the team of Democracy Now produces a progressive and thoroughly rigorous newscast. In Quebec, the Pivot team does not claim neutrality, but regularly publishes solid investigative articles, notably from the pen of André Noël, a former journalist for The Press. As we can see, there are many examples where a committed posture can not only be combine to a journalistic or scientific approach, but even to feed the latter with a different look.
How to explain, then, this almost militant clinging of the deputy editor to impartiality? Why this insistent desire to associate the basis of the profession with a single type of practice? The type of neutral and detached journalism that a large part of the profession calls for has not always existed. It imposed itself at the beginning of the XXe century, when newspaper companies came to see information as a commodity to attract a large target audience to client advertisers. During this time, the professionalization of the profession of journalist led to a gradual estrangement from social movements, which the milieu began to see as obsessed (even blinded) by their cause.
Today, when our societies are experiencing so many major shifts, why couldn’t journalism also review its ways of doing things?
Howard Zinn liked to say that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train”. This is all the more true when climate change leads the train towards the abyss. François Cardinal seems to deplore the fact that journalists enter the profession wanting to “change the world”. But neutrality and detachment are too values. And every value has its blind spots. As freelance journalist Christopher Curtis said on Twitter on Sunday in response to the associate editor’s post, a neutral gaze “will always be the perspective of the status quo.”
As our societies grapple with crises threatening the future of humanity itself, there is nothing impartial about observing the collapse impartially. Refusing to act is also a committed choice.