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When it came to the practice of journalism, a form of empiricism, stemming from the Enlightenment and reflecting, for example, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s primacy of reason over the senses (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019: 23), had become evident several decades earlier. Schudson, for example, has categorised journalists at the turn of the century as ‘naïve empiricists’ who believed in facts as aspects of the world itself, rather than human statements about the world (1978).

It would be oversimplifying events, however, to ascribe the origins of Anglo-American journalism’s objectivity norm solely to the rise of rational thought. As Schudson has observed, the establishment of objectivity reflected a far broader confluence of factors at the end of the 19th century rather than being the product of one ‘magical moment’ (2001: 167). Such factors included the desire of journalists to create a profession that would stand out against the emerging discipline of Public Relations, pitting journalism directly against the very idea of suggestion and persuading the public. In addition, a series of commercial considerations and technological developments on both sides of the Atlantic played a key role in developing the objectivity norm. The expansion of mass printing led proprietors on both sides of the Atlantic to try to maximise their profits by appealing to a far wider audience of readers. As a consequence, a more balanced, impartial style of reporting was developed (e.g., to appeal to both Republican and Democrat readers in the United States). The emergence of the big news agencies, the Associated Press and Reuters, founded in 1846 and 1851 respectively, coincided with the invention of the telegraph and fostered a clipped factual style that is still known today in German as Telegrammenstil. As Maras has observed (2013: 2), the concept of objectivity has very much been the product of history, linked to particular cultural formulations and the professional aspirations of journalists themselves.

In the United States, the professionalisation of journalism gathered pace in the 1920s with the formation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 1922 and a desire to distance journalism from the growing number of Public Relations experts and propagandists emerging around the time of World War I. Schudson (2001: 162) writes:

Journalists grew self-conscious about the manipulability of information in the propaganda age. They felt a need to close ranks and assert their collective integrity in the face of their close encounter with the publicity agents’ unembarrassed effort to use information (or misinformation) to promote special interests.

The influence of the Chicago School also extended into the world of journalism, in which the leading figure Park drew a distinction between news and sensationalist human interest stories (1938: 204):

Not everything printed in the newspapers is news. Much that is printed as news is read, at least, as if it were literature; read, that is to say, because it is thrilling and stirs the imagination and not because its message is urgent and demands action. Such, for example, are the ‘human interest’ stories, so called, which have been so influential in expanding and maintaining newspaper circulation. But human interest stories are not news. They are literature.

For Park, such sensationalism had no place in news, which required a form of objectivity to allow readers to make up their own minds about a story. Journalism still had a mission to entertain, but this had to be linked to a goal of informing the public (Muhlmann, 2010). A disciple of Park, Helen M. Hughes, whose classic examination of the US tabloid press News and the Human Interest Story was published in 1940, continued in this vein, insisting that such stories have to have a basis in the ‘truth’ in order to provide news. She thus sets up a divide between reality and fiction that is still key to understanding the basis of objective journalism.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom it has been argued that an increasing emphasis on ‘news’ and ‘facts’ emerged in the late 19th century, together with the development of professional standards of objectivity and a relative depoliticisation of the news (Hampton, 2001). In a parallel development to the United States, news agency copy, in this case from Reuters, began to be increasingly used as a source of content, reducing the opportunity for partisan comment. Robert Blackford, editor of the socialist weekly Clarion, underscored this growing trend towards facts when he wrote at the turn of the century (cited in Hampton, 2001: 218):

Figures are sacred emblems. They are the skeleton of thought. Lack of precision in figures, lack of reverence for the exactitudes in estimates, are intellectual immoralities of the deadliest kind.

Tellingly, there were already signs of a tabloid press, and its penchant for ‘stings’, in the emerging UK newspaper industry at this time. As Sparks notes (2000: 20), a culture of tabloid journalism, based on sensational coverage of controversial topics and associated with working-class readers, continued to flourish in what became known as the ‘new journalism’ of the London press. Örnebring and Jönsson (2004) cite the case of the Pall Mall Gazette and its sensationalist campaign against juvenile prostitution. Using methods akin to today’s London tabloid ‘stings’, the Gazette’s editor, W. T. Stead, posed as a ‘vicious man’ to buy a young girl from her parents with a view to selling her on to a brothel. The subsequent articles, one of which was headlined ‘The Confessions of a Brothel Keeper’, caused an uproar, with some advertisers boycotting the newspaper. But the campaign also led to a change in the law, raising the age of consent to 16 years. The case clearly illustrates the power of tabloid reporting. While it is not unexpected for the boundaries between a more fact-based and more sensational news reporting to be blurred during this period of rapid development of the press, it is easy to see how the practice has been replicated in the 20th and 21st centuries. While it is common to equate sensationalist copy with the need to sell newspapers, such journalism and crusades can, sometimes, serve the public good as well as dry factual reporting and even enrich journalism (Zelizer, 2000: x). Critics of the British press, who spoke out volubly during the Leveson Inquiry, contend that tabloid editors at the turn of 20th century lost sight of the press’ mission to inform in favour of generating sales and cultivating political power.