The well-deserved outcry regarding the New York Times’ insufficiently critical profile about a Nazi in the American heartland has exposed a commonly held myth about journalism: that our profession is objective. This is a lie.

When a reporter at the American “paper of record” can admit that his story didn’t hold up and their editor chose to assign significant resources towards it and published it anyway, journalism is clearly not based on meritocracy or neutrality.

Rather, with journalism jobs going to white people 87% of the time in the US and a staggering 94% in Britain, journalism is practically a white-people-only club that will reward mediocre white journalists before it will advance excellent journalists of color who can bring needed perspectives.

Our racially monolithic mainstream press is particularly ill equipped to cover an increasingly non-white world when it declares itself to be “objective”. Like other parts of the society, journalism operates within an ideology which bell hooks describes as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.

Through different means, Breitbart and the New York Times can both reinforce this ideology when they write about Nazis. But all liberal media outlets (it’s not just the Times) are more dangerous in doing this work, because they refuse to wrestle with their own subjectivity.

When liberal news outlets manage to humanize Nazis – as well as serial killers like cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, cult leader Charles Manson, and Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock – while also being unable to humanize young black men who are killed by police like Mike Brown, they are subjectively reinforcing the ideology of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

This same ideology was also at work given how many journalists knew about, but did not chase down or publish the “open secret” of Harvey Weinstein’s many transgressions. Because of the patriarchy that dominates newsrooms – and because of the financial and cultural power of Harvey Weinstein in the media – highly subjective journalists often looked the other way.



But while no journalist or news organization is objective, only some of us – usually the disabled, queer, women, and journalists of color among us – are forced to reckon with this reality. And though we are often punished for interrogating our subjectivities, white men (like Mark Lilla, Jonathan Chait and Andrew Sullivan) are rewarded for pretending like theirs don’t exist – even as they shape our national narratives from their subjective point of view.

For instance, in January, Lewis Wallace, the only out transgender national radio reporter who worked for the public radio show Marketplace, wrote a thoughtful essay on Medium called “Objectivity is dead, and I’m okay with it.”

In it, Wallace wrote: “Neutrality is impossible for me, and you should admit that it is for you, too,” that “It matters who is making editorial decisions,” that “facts are real, but so are priorities and perspective,” and that “we can check our facts, tell the truth, and hold the line without pretending that there is no ethical basis to the work that we do.”

When teaching writing classes, I plan to teach this essay, for it gets at the important mission we have as journalists to interrogate the world and to interrogate the subjectivity in how we are framing stories.

But for writing this, Wallace was fired, which was a shame on many levels. At the same time, I will not hold my breath for anything bad to happen to anyone at the New York Times for miserably failing to interrogate their own biases in conceiving and developing that Nazi story. (Might the news coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign have been different if the biases of Mark Halperin and Glenn Thrush – white men with powerful media jobs who both are accused of sexual harassment –had been scrutinized?)

You can’t have a nearly all white editorial workforce and not have it be subjective. Sarah Schulman writes that “Gentrification is a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves.” In the same way, the myth of objectivity has deluded journalists who are white, male, straight, cisgender, able-bodied US citizens into believing they are the neutral point against which all other perspectives are a deviation.

And as long as they keep printing puff profiles of Nazis, while ignoring so many other important stories, we will all pay the price.