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When people consider how journalists should respond to a toxic public sphere, they sometimes suggest that the “answer” is that journalists should publish accurate reports, period; and not publish fake news or intolerant views. Unfortunately, the answer is not that simple. The problem goes beyond accuracy. One can accurately report fake claims by quoting officials. Also, fake news is produced by sources other than mainstream news media. Journalists cannot entirely ignore unreasonable people, since what they do and say has social implications.

Another suggested answer is that journalists should stop “editorializing” and be neutral, and not take sides on any issue or problem. But neutrality is the wrong ideal for a socially embedded profession like journalism. There are many topics where neutrality is absurd. Should journalists be neutral on whether child sexual abuse is right or wrong? If doing a story on child sexual abuse, should the journalism, to be balanced and objective, quote someone who thinks child sexual abuse is a good thing? Of course not.

Journalists have always struggled to be neutral. Some of the best works of journalism have not been neutral. In 1887, Elizabeth Cochrane, one the first female reporters, writing under the pseudonym of Nellie Bly, went to work at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. One of her first projects was to get herself committed to the asylum on Roosevelt Island by feigning insanity. Her exposé of conditions among the patients precipitated a grand-jury investigation and sparked improvements in patient care. Was Nellie Bly neutral? No. Were the editors of The Washington Post and The New York Times neutral when they opposed Richard Nixon in publishing the Pentagon papers? Such journalists were engaged, their works were value-laden, and goal-driven. Yet they did not simply editorialize. They dug deep for hidden, important facts. Today, when journalism awards are handed out, the winning stories are lauded for their engagement: e.g., revealing some injustice. There is not much talk about neutrality.

As for sticking to the facts, pragmatic objectivity agrees that factuality is important. But being factual is not easy. For example, journalists should ask: What facts, and whose facts? What is a fact today is often what some prominent person says is a fact. Journalists should ask: Is this really a fact? If we have facts, what do they mean? Who stands to benefit if this is reported as fact? What facts are ignored or presumed? Historian David Mindich has documented how American newspapers covered the lynching of African Americans in the 1890s. The papers covered them in a matter-of-fact dispassionate manner. The coverage expressed no emotion. It accepted the view that the black men were guilty of rape, though they were never tried. African Americans were depicted as cowards, and white subjects as heroes, in a detached writing style.²⁶

Moreover, the idea that reports are, or should be, only collages of facts, scrubbed free of interpretation by the reporter, is a myth. Even straight news stories involve the reporter’s perspective on what the story is about, the angle to take, the sources to choose, the facts to include. The stories of journalism contain conjectures, expert opinion, theories, historical perspectives, and science. Further, what needs coverage is not just official facts but trends; needed reforms; implications of new technology; cultural attitudes; ethnic tensions; moral questions; history; inequalities; powerful, behind-the scenes, groups; and how people interpret the basic political principles of their society. This requires a journalism of investigation, of reform, of interpretation, and a journalism of reasoned debate. To do so properly, journalists need to be nuanced interpreters of culture and history. Better to start with the idea that stories are interpretations and seek a way to test them. One way to test them, and only one, is whether a story fits the facts available. The story also has to cohere conceptually, logically, and be consistent with existing knowledge and theory. A story needs to be able to withstand strenuous public scrutiny and the questions raised by alternate perspectives. The criteria by which we evaluate stories are plural.

Moreover, the use of facts is a complex matter, requiring us to properly interpret the meaning of facts. Facts need context, and context is a matter of interpretation. For instance, government statistics about the rate of unemployment and police “facts” about how well they are fighting crime in their community should not be accepted (or reported) at face value. Journalists should use statistical (and other) methods to interpret the data. In health reporting, journalists should compare the cancer rate of a group in a clinical trial with background levels of cancer in the general population. In political reporting, the facts of opinion polls are worthless unless correctly interpreted. Often, getting the correct interpretation of the facts is as important as knowing the “bare” facts. We need to select facts for relevance and importance, organize them into coherent statistical patterns, and place them in their proper context. Odd or contentious facts may be overridden or doubted by other considerations, such as coherence with existing knowledge. Nevertheless, empirical facts originate in the deliverances of our senses and therefore anchor our conceptual systems in experience.

There is perhaps no more succinct debunking of the idea that isolated facts have a special power by themselves than John Dewey’s introduction to The Public and Its Problems.²⁷ In a few pages, Dewey throws cold water on the idea that facts “carry their meaning along on themselves on their face.” There can be disagreement on the facts or on what they mean. There may be insufficient facts to establish a claim. The same facts may support rival interpretations. Purported facts may be false or manipulated. Dewey points out that a few recalcitrant facts cannot force a person to accept or abandon a particular theory. Neo-pragmatist Willard V.O. Quine argued that facts never “prove” an empirical theory. There is always the possibility of an equally good, rival theory. Just as facts “under-determine” scientific theory, so they under-determine our news reports.²⁸

Yet, despite these cautions about a simplistic view of facts, pragmatic objectivity in journalism does not dismiss the importance of facts, properly understood. To the contrary, it recognizes, for instance, the importance of facts to investigative journalists in their efforts to expose government corruption. Pragmatic objectivity does not share the post-modern skepticism that there are no facts. Rather, it rejects the mythical idea of “pure” facts or a pure “given” in experience that is known without any interpretation, and the mythical idea that such facts are the sole and sufficient basis for evaluating the objectivity of reports. Pragmatic objectivity regards facts as creatures of interpretation and conceptual schemes. What we consider a fact depends on our belief systems, worldview, and epistemic norms.