Yesterday’s piece by the New York Times public editor raises a critical question: Should reporters at major news outlets “challenge ‘facts”’ offered by sources and seek the truth?

Public editor Arthur Brisbane was right to say he doesn’t think the newspaper’s sources are being appropriately challenged. He also wondered, somewhat perplexingly, if maybe, just maybe, truth should be a priority?

Executive editor Jill Abramson offered a rebuttal to her colleague in which she claimed that the NYT does indeed challenge statements of fact, on principle. Sometimes this is true, but often it’s false: Questionable and unverified statements by sources, especially those by U.S. officials, are regularly printed in the paper and posted online as Truth without any apparent skepticism, questioning, or clarification. The fact that many of these statements are later determined to be bogus has not seemed to increase the general level of skepticism in reporting.

Brisbane, who has opened a welcome debate on the proper role of journalists in a democracy, awkwardly expressed a truism: Professional journalism in the U.S. reveres a “neutral,” “objective,” and “balanced” stance in which the challenging of sources on the veracity of their statements is deemed equivalent to taking sides.  Many lies therefore go unchallenged because to cry foul would be in violation of journalistic decency.

The Walter Lippman-John Dewey debate in the late 1920s provides us with some context to the current one sparked by Brisbane. Should the press treat citizens as passive spectators of the activities of political elites (Lippman) or should it assume citizens are intelligent enough to participate in the day-to-day workings of the democratic process (Dewey)? We’ve been living in Lippman’s world but there is an increasing call for a move away from elite-managed democracy to democracy by the 99%, with the implication that our media system must also become more functionally democratic. The Occupy movement has been making a cogent argument for more journalism of the type preferred by Dewey. 

The practice and pretense of “objective journalism” is a relatively recent and particularly American phenomenon. The American press was, until about a century ago, unapologetically partisan. Then, with the rise of the advertising industry, explains NYU professor of journalism Jay Rosen, publishers, journalists, and advertisers essentially struck a “grand bargain” to stay neutral and inoffensive in order to maximize eyeballs. The dominance of today’s false-balance approach to political reporting is a product of a media system that is financially dependent on advertising revenue and overwhelmingly dominated by large corporations (even “public” news media outlets like NPR and PBS are highly dependent on corporate underwriting).

Most other democratic countries have more pluralistic media systems. In my experience living in Europe, for example, there’s generally less cultural and economic pressure for news organizations to pretend to be objective—it’s more acceptable for them to take a principled stand on what’s happening in the world. 

While reality is certainly objective (either the Holocaust happened or it didn’t), the relating of reality is always subjective. We can approach the objective truth in our storytelling, but in order to try to get anywhere close to it we need the courage to take a stand.

Objective journalism is thus a fantasy and a myth. All news media organizations must choose a frame, or perspective, for their stories, i.e. an implicit question or set of questions that the report is attempting to answer. (Which groups does the story’s frame serve? In whose interests are the questions?) They must decide which topics and facts to include, and which topics and facts to leave out. They must use some words and not other words. They must decide who to quote and who not to quote, which quotes to use, and so on.

Instead of pretending to be objective, professional news organizations should be unafraid to be transparent about their political and economic interests. Two quintessential examples of transparent, highly accurate and reliable news outlets that value truth over objectivity are the Financial Times of London on the right, and Democracy Now! on the left. The FT does not bother trying to hide the fact that it prioritizes the interests of wealthy investors, high-level managers, and other masters of the universe (a k a “the 1%”), a power elite perspective that does not detract from the paper’s truly excellent global journalism. Similarly, DN! is unafraid to stick its neck out for social justice concerns and the most vulnerable, offering first-rate reports and interviews from inside the U.S. and around the world, despite zero corporate funding.

When government officials, political candidates, “experts,” and other public figures lie or misrepresent the truth, when statements taken by a reporter contradict known reality, this misinformation needs to be explicitly called out for what it is. Blatant lies should be called lies. Questionable statements of importance need to be questioned and investigated, not simply quoted and balanced with someone else’s counter-statement.

Sometimes of course, not enough information is available to make such a judgment. But when reporters and their bosses have the answer to their question, whatever it may be, they have a social and professional responsibility to state this explicitly.

Avoiding this type of public judgment about truth and falsehood makes life easier and more comfortable—for journalists or for anyone else. But the hard work of seeking out and publicly stating the truth is precisely the job of professional journalists and their organizations. 

Why does corporate media so often pretend to be objective? Is it a desire to solicit continued access to the powerful? To appease advertisers? Are either of these more important than stating the truth? A press that puts truth above all else—and is therefore not afraid to take sides—is a crucial ingredient for a healthy, functional democratic society. If we want justice, we’ll need more bold truthtellers.

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