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This balancing act always falls over

“Objectivity” first appears as a word in 1855. By the 1990s, in a report from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, the NYU journalism school professor Jay Rosen could call it “perhaps the major contribution American journalism has made to the rest of the world”. There can be little question that of all English-speaking presses, the American has most often reached for “objectivity” as a touchstone of legitimacy. To be clear at the outset, this (arguably) American ideology of journalism, though increasingly criticised, remains dominant throughout much of the developed world. A simple search in Google News for the term “objective journalism” confirms this – there are critical think-pieces and even occasional elegies, but also ubiquitous uses of the term as the go-to standard for journalistic best practice. Beware, however, of Americans bearing gifts. Objective journalism signals a very problematic ideology. It poses a “conceptual problem” (as Rosen himself concedes) as it cannot be readily defined. An illustrative example of the impacts of this problem is how unhelpful a defence objectivity has proved for the BBC. Historically, the corporation has preferred “impartiality” as its term for objectivity, but call it what you will – balance, fairness, neutrality or, most vexed and unguaranteed of any of them, truthfulness – all are conceptually dicey. All are subject to an immediately debilitating rider: whatever that means. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition requires “treating the subject not coloured by the feelings or opinions of the writer”. In the