Can one pronounce impartially in favor of impartiality, a fortiori if one considers oneself rather progressive? The paradox is only apparent: it is based on one of the many myths that maintain a confused debate.
Because impartiality is the opposite of its caricature. It in no way obliges us to lazily adopt a middle position between one opinion and another or to grant them equal speaking time. On the contrary, it lies in the obstinate search for facts which may or may not contradict opinions. Whatever the source, powerful or miserable, sympathetic or not. And in particular those that we have ourselves: it is not in the camp of ideological pleasure, it is in the other. That’s why we don’t like him very much.
But of course, these facts are not essentially neutral: they result from choices in the profusion of reality and one cannot give them meaning without interpreting them: “we do not see the world as it is, we let’s see as we are”, summed up Anaïs Nin. Whence a second commonplace, often brandished as a deep thought: absolute impartiality being illusory, reason would dictate giving it up. The premise is solid, the conclusion is absurd: it ignores through naivety or duplicity the difference between a possible state and a reference value.
No one can be perfectly impartial, but everyone can try to be, which is already not so bad.
Especially since the sophism of perfection would lead at the same time to rejecting other chimerical reference values in the absolute, including democracy, justice and equality, which would probably not be a good idea.
Good or bad bias?
“It is quite possible to successfully combine the quest for information or knowledge and social commitment”, Philippe de Grosbois recently underlined in these columns. It couldn’t be said better and multiple examples can demonstrate it. But at the same time, these examples eloquently illustrate the danger of the thing. In journalism as in scientific research, commitment leads, in order to ward off nuance and doubt, to take from what Hannah Arendt called factual matter only what reinforces a position. We will celebrate militant journalists, we will omit others, from Édouard Drumont to Tucker Carlson via Benito Mussolini. I still do not know according to which logical rule a camp manages to distinguish for sure a good and a bad partiality to celebrate one without supporting the other. On the contrary, research has established that the reliability of speakers – including media – was inversely proportional to the strength of their convictions. Some of the examples cited by him certainly do not deny it, while so many others, not mentioned, have shown and continue to show every day that we make society progress at least as much by toiling more humbly to reveal facts without selecting them.
But isn’t journalistic impartiality an invention of the 19th century?e century intended to increase the sales of paper merchants? Selective memory again.
In fact, the history of the press attests that from its birth, two centuries earlier, journalism had rightly been based on an explicit promise of impartiality.
Both in the Anglophone and Francophone spheres. It is true that this founding commitment (whether it was fulfilled or not…) was not without an audience target: for the newcomer, it was a question of defining a territory that distinguished him from the swarm of other writings. It’s always like that. But it is also true that this area was quickly taken over by those who wanted to exploit it to their liking. It wasn’t even difficult. During the French Revolution, for example, the exalted voices of Hébert and Marat resounded much louder than that of another journalist, Condorcet, when he warned that “the friends of truth are those who seek it and not those who boast of having found it”.
The friends of journalism are those who serve it, not those who use it. Those who militate for him rather than those who militate through him, even for a just cause. Serge July, who does not pass for an ultra-conservative, told me of his bewilderment at the number of journalism students who interrupt his presentations with all the assurance of romantic souls to whom doubt is foreign. Valiant souls many of whom will realize later, perhaps too late, that their moral addiction threatens above all the oppressed they believe they are defending. Because in a world polarized between the certainties of each other, what remains of the specific territory of journalism lies in the preservation of a type of truth that does not depend too much on one point of view. In defense of a credible point of reference, whether believed or not. Seizing it to serve a cause would strip him of this specificity, reducing him to an opinion like the others in the tumult of digital subjectivities. What weight would then have all the anomalies and injustices that he exposes, with supporting facts?
Even impossible, impartiality is emancipatory. Even virtuous, “convictions are prisons” (Nietzsche). However, activism and journalism are not directly opposed. This forced alternative still reflects an unthought. There is not enough space to demonstrate it here (I have done it elsewhere2), but much of the debate on journalism, including on its definition, presupposes the existence somewhere of a natural boundary that can separate what is from what is not. We often looked for it, we never found it. Because it doesn’t exist. Like a very large part of human reality (for example being sick or cultured), journalism is a gradual notion. It translates in this case the proximity or the distance with an ideal type, of which it can be shown that impartiality is precisely one of the fundamental attributes. The closer we get to these, the more what we produce resembles “real journalism”. This is why a militant article can indeed be one. Sometimes clearly, but often very little: it is a question of measurement. In every sense of the word.
*This reflection does not in the least express a doctrinal position of the Journalism Notebookswho pride themselves on the contrary in publishing texts that disturb them.