Pragmatism can solve journalism’s truth problem

This post was originally published by the Institute of Art and Ideas and is republished here with permission as part of the Blog of APA’s partnership with the Institute.

The Ukraine ceasefire is reported radically differently across global media, despite each claiming to tell the truth. This exposes the myth of journalistic neutrality—the view from nowhere. Nina Lyon argues, instead of giving up in favor of anything-goes relativism, pragmatic philosophy offers an alternative: we can use coherence to determine whether a narrative is valid, while acknowledging all reporting emerges from its own context, values and biases.

Open any major news site and, depending on its audience and location, you’ll find very different accounts of the Ukraine ceasefire. The BBC leads with concerns about Russian manipulation and lies about its intentions to end the war. Russia’s TASS reports on French and British leaders drumming up further sanctions and a Western military presence in Ukraine. China’s Global Times notes the U.S. making contradictory promises that lack long-term credibility.

The same facts about the same event spawn very different stories. We can write off rival accounts as the propaganda campaigns of our enemies, but this poses its own problem: how can we feel confident that our own reporting is neutral and unbiased, and the best version of what really happened? We like to see the West as the purveyor of objective truth, honed by centuries of empiricism and free speech norms—and the BBC, at least, doesn’t generally have form for stories about bioweapon birds bearing genetically engineered viruses to selectively attack Slavs.

But our claim to objectivity sometimes looks fragile: apparently sober and neutral predictions of an imminent collapse of the Russian economy that would soon end the war don’t look too credible now. There are risks attached to mistaking wishful thinking for the unvarnished truth. Giving up on truth comes with even bigger risks. You end up in a toxic soup of conspiracy theories: that the West faked the Bucha massacre, or the initial invasion was itself filmed by actors for bizarre and nefarious reasons.

Describing an event in the world entails picking out bits of information about that event: drill down and there is always more detail, another angle, additional evidence to bolster the account. We are, therefore, always making choices when reporting. The facts we report on are our chosen facts. This doesn’t mean that we are inevitably engaged in propaganda, the intentional shaping of stories for manipulative effect. We can choose our facts in good faith, seeking to represent the event as we have witnessed it, or in congruence with the information we can find about it. It is, however, always a choice, due to the impossibility of capturing everything.

This isn’t just a journalistic problem. In this landscape, faced with a smorgasbord of competing narratives to choose from, readers have to balance their desire to identify true information with their own social and psychological biases. We tend to seek out information that validates our existing beliefs and lines up with the opinions of people around us. As social animals, these tendencies are hard to escape.

But most of us also want a handle on reality. A risk of belief in the objectivity of the stories we consume in a fragmented information landscape where multiple apparently valid competing claims to reality exist is that we can become even more certain in our bias: I know the news I read is the objective truth, and therefore I must be right. We therefore need access to a version of events that doesn’t get trapped in naïve beliefs in objectivity or surrender to nihilistic relativism. To get there, it’s helpful to understand how journalism came to chase objectivity in the first place.

The history of journalistic objectivity

The idea that a journalist should—or even could—be objective would have seemed absurd to nineteenth century newspaper readers. Newspapers were brazenly partisan: the New York Tribune was openly pro-Republican, pro-Whig and pro-abolitionist. The British Pall Mall Gazette was unashamedly activist for liberal causes. The “penny press”—cheap tabloid newspapers accessible for a newly literate working class—moved away from explicit political campaigning but were led by profits. News wasn’t about the sober reporting of facts, but about scandal and sensation. It was in the business of selling stories for various ends.

Meanwhile, Enlightenment faith in human reason and the scientific revolution’s emphasis on empirical observation were shaping Western philosophical beliefs. By the time journalism began to professionalize in the early twentieth century, the progressive position was to embrace a positivistic pursuit of objective truth.

Columbia’s School of Journalism began teaching objectivity as a core value. With the rise of television news, iconic broadcast journalists like CBS’s Walter Cronkite or the BBC’s Kate Adie cemented the image of the reporter as a neutral conveyor of facts. CNN’s Christine Amanpour, who became famous for fearless, on-the-ground reporting in war zones, expressed this cultural belief in the journalist as unbiased witness: “I’m not taking sides. The only side I’m taking is the truth.” Journalism professor Jay Rosen calls this “the view from nowhere”—the idea that journalists can somehow transcend the various biases, norms, and limitations that shape human cognition to become unbiased agents of truth.

The Wild West

Then the internet happened. Suddenly, readers were exposed to an informational free-for-all where a vast multiplicity of takes were on offer outside the traditional authoritative sources they had previously relied on to explain the world. The façade of a singular truth crumbled.

Part of the new Wild West of online news was a chasing of clicks instead of credibility. In crowded marketplace, attention was a valuable commodity. This was, perhaps, not that different from the Penny Press, a relentlessly market-focused approach to populist story-telling. But the internet also created a new set of social and psychological dynamics, in which people could access stories that were personally satisfying or validating, and find online communities who shared their beliefs. This created distinct epistemic silos in which people could retreat with the feeling of security in their shared truths. By 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” Word of the Year, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

The first Trump presidency was characterized by horror at the rise of fake news, which saw fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact proliferate. But the fact-checkers displayed their own limitations and biases, creating a “who guards the guards?” problem of policing truth.

In the meantime, mainstream media continued to hemorrhage audiences. The claim of the view from nowhere had lost its appeal. Attempts to impose balance by maintaining a tone of studied neutrality or the “both-sidesism” of incorporating opposing views without picking a side failed to address this. Furthermore, as Rosen observed, it could lead journalists to over-rely on quoting establishment sources as mouthpieces for stories out of fear of expressing a personal opinion. The view from nowhere was starting to look like its own distinctive form of bias.

The problem of objectivity

There is another problem that arises from delusions of our own objectivity, which is that any deviation from it must be error or deceit. Our accounts of mis- and disinformation are rooted in this viewpoint: if people disagree with me, they must have been poisoned by bad or malign information. Some of the more deranged conspiracy theories about Ukraine or vaccines meet this definition—but disinformation is also a gift to authoritarian regimes seeking control over any inconvenient narratives. If we determine that the information is causing you harm, we have no choice but to shut it down.

Does this mean we should abandon objectivity entirely? Rosen’s critique of objectivity in journalism—along with its name—draws on philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book The View From Nowhere, in which Nagel argues that human understanding always emerges from a particular perspective. We can never fully escape our subjective viewpoint but can, paradoxically, work towards a more objective understanding by acknowledging the limitations this places on us. Both subjective and objective perspectives have value, and our consciousness is shaped by the tension between them.

Rosen’s solution for journalism is that reporters should embrace a “view from somewhere” —abandoning the pretense of neutrality in favor of transparency about their perspectives, methods, and values.

This still, however, leaves a more fundamental problem: how do we determine which of many competing views from somewhere better reflect reality? Even if I’m honest about my Western perspective and—rest your skepticism for a moment here—RT were to be honest about its Kremlin-aligned perspective, and we each commit to reporting on the same events on the ground, we will still face contradictions between those accounts.

One of the problems faced by the fact-checking sites was that complex statements about the world are resistant to straightforward true-false fact-checking. There usually isn’t a single identifiable corresponding fact to pin a statement onto—and the same evidence can be construed to credibly fit more than one account. Who fired the first shot in a conflict might depend on the evidence, definitions or timeframe you happen to be working with, even if you are seeking that information in good faith rather than the service of propaganda.

Enter pragmatism

Pragmatism offers us a lifeline here. Thinkers like William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey rejected both the myth of pure objectivity and the trap of relativism. Instead, they proposed evaluating beliefs based on their coherence—their internal consistency, explanatory power, and practical implications. An assertion needed to make sense in the context of our knowledge of the world.

A coherence-based approach to journalism doesn’t ask the impossible question “Does this story perfectly mirror reality?” Instead, it asks: is it the best fit, given what we know so far? Does it hang together logically? Does it explain more facts with fewer contradictions? Does it help us navigate the world effectively?

Russia’s bioweapon birds conspiracy would fail basic coherence tests: it’s hard to see how you could genetically target Russians and not Ukrainians; it requires improbable secret coordination among scientists without leaks; as an explanation it provokes more questions than it resolves, requiring more suspensions of disbelief than a Marvel movie. Giving up on objectivity doesn’t mean we need to validate your beliefs in 5G-radiating Covid vaccines—if they lack coherence with everything else we know about science, we can conclude that they aren’t useful and ditch them.

Coherence moves beyond asking “Did this really happen?” to asking “Which explanation creates fewer contradictions across our entire network of beliefs?” It’s not perfect, but it’s far more useful than pretending we can simply check the facts to resolve conflicts that are fundamentally rooted in how we interpret those facts, and which facts we interpret in the first place. It takes into account the same contextual information about our own affiliations, beliefs and limitations that Rosen and Nagel argue for—these help explain how we can come to different interpretations of the same events, and help us guard against our blind spots—and uses those as part of the web of information we are seeking coherence with.

Coherence-based sense-making

We can put this into practice when faced with competing news accounts. We can diversify our sources of information, not only over political divides but by getting our news from other countries and cultures, which can help reveal our blind spots even if they have biases and flaws. We can notice the evidence that these different accounts include and exclude—they might both draw on credible facts, but choose different ones to support their narratives. And we can ask ourselves: what are the conditions in which this perspective would make sense to someone? We don’t need to uncritically accept all claims, but it’s helpful to understand their merits.

And we can look not only at the coherence of one journalistic account of the world versus another, but draw on both of those, if they seem to offer useful, valid insights, into higher-order accounts of how both those competing narratives came to co-exist. A coherent understanding of Ukraine doesn’t just explain military developments; it also explains why Russian media frames events one way and Western media another. It accounts for the information environments, historical experiences, and institutional pressures that shape these divergent narratives.

Journalism that is honest about its starting point, humble in its limitations and that strives for a bigger-picture coherence in our narratives about events can help us find common ground with others, rather than viewing them as wrong or evil. Reporting on peace deals that seeks to understand the positions of different players—rather than impose partisan moral certainty bolstered by belief in one’s own neutrality—might help all sides find a peaceful solution rather than rush to save face. And, sometimes, our enemies will remain our enemies—but if they have coherent stories that we abandon based on our own delusions of a single objective truth, we risk excising ways of understanding the world that can be useful to us, too.

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