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At this stage of its development, Anglo-American journalism had positioned itself as an elite profession, able to distance itself from what it considered to be the harmful influence of propaganda and other forms of media on society, rising above the masses, holding authority to account and helping to formulate opinion for the public good. This sweeping agenda had been enshrined in the United States by Hutchins and the FCC. But no sooner were the cornerstones of this value system in place than they started to wobble. During the 1960s, the challenges came from within the ranks of journalists, from academics and from a combination of external forces (Maras, 2013: 54; Schudson, 1978).

Prominent journalists started questioning the ideal of objectivity, which at one stage even became a term of abuse and was seen as a flawed doctrine (Schudson, 1978: 160). Objectivity, which had been based on the principle of eliminating bias, came to be seen as biased in itself by refusing to question the structures of power and by reinforcing official views of reality. The daily sign-off by Cronkite at the end of the CBS news bulletin ‘That’s the way it is’ was considered by some as just too smug (Schudson, 1978: 161). US journalist Martha Gellhorn, one of the first female war correspondents, had already foreshadowed the trend, declaring that she had ‘no time for all this objectivity shit’ (Moorehead, 2003). Her reporting from Dachau, as she accompanied the US 7th Army on their liberation of the concentration camp in 1945, was based on deeply moving, detailed first-person observation, a style that would be echoed later in what became known as ‘journalism of attachment’ during the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s.

In America’s post-war history, the questioning of objectivity needs to be examined initially in the context of the Cold War and Vietnam. Senator Joseph McCarthy was widely seen as exploiting the doctrine of objective news to foster his anti-Communist witch hunt. The method of reporting simply what was said prevented journalists from denouncing his accusations as false (Boudana, 2011). Ever more intrusive news management by government, especially around the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam War, led US journalists to question why they should simply relay what were lies or disinformation from government spokesmen. As a result, a more interpretive form of journalism began to evolve on both sides of the Atlantic, injecting the opinion of reporters (again as an elite) into news. When it came to war reporting, any pretence of objectivity was sometimes dropped (Schudson, 1978: 183) although the underlying power structures were not necessarily questioned. The Vietnam War was a case in point. While US media were broadly supportive at the beginning, they later became highly critical of its conduct by the military and US administration. But as Curran points out (2011), this discussion debated the execution and strategy of the war without questioning the underlying objective of Cold War containment. The US press generally backed the 1990 Gulf War campaign against Iraq, and for some academics such as McChesney was a propaganda organ for militarism and war (2002: 93). Similarly, the British press backed Margaret Thatcher’s military operation to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982. Even though correspondents in the field embedded with the British forces saw their stories heavily censored, they identified themselves closely with the troops and the war (Tumber, 2004: 191). The British journalist and historian Max Hastings, who covered the war, at the time quoted his father (who had also been a war correspondent) as saying (cited in Belsey & Chadwick, 1992: 115):

When one’s nation is at war, reporting becomes an extension of the war effort. Objectivity only comes back into fashion when the black-out comes down.

Other direct challenges to objectivity, and particularly the concepts of driving out emotion and adopting a value neutral stance, came after the 1987 deregulation of the US radio market and the advent of openly partisan talk radio. In television, the right-leaning Fox News Channel, launched in 1996 and owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, challenged what it saw as the liberal bias of the establishment television news networks and presented news ‘with a voice’ (Maras, 2013: 72). It in turn spawned a liberal-leaning version in MSNBC. It can be argued that these channels and partisan journalism have become established as part of the US media landscape and they are important vehicles for attracting advertising revenue. Maras (2013: 179) argues that Fox turns back the clock to the time of partisan US media in the 1800s before the codification of objectivity. The ‘Foxification’ of news has been rejected by several established media organisations such as the BBC (Maras, 2013: 179); its challenge is symptomatic of the often tense professional and academic debate around objectivity, the contestation of boundaries and what Gieryn (1999) called ‘credibility contests’.

A further challenge was represented by the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1960s and 1970s, which was ‘powered by feeling as well as intellect’ (Hentoff, cited in Schudson, 1978: 187) and featured writers such as Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. It was a reaction to what some of these writers saw as the failure of conventional news reporting. Mailer said (cited in Weingarten, 2006: 54):

I had felt that I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time.

But this new form of journalism, or combination of literature and journalism, was also not taken up by mainstream journalism. Its openly avowed that subjectivity was a clear challenge to the normative values laid down earlier, which ultimately prevailed. Stylistically, stories by the New Journalism authors often eschewed the classic inverted pyramid structure that was so typical of the objectivity paradigm (although the opposite construction, the ‘delayed drop’, in which facts are introduced after a ‘soft’, feature-like start to a story, is often used as a device in conventional journalism). Weingarten argues that it was not just the enduring power of the objectivity norm but also economics that led to the decline of New Journalism (2006: 292). US television channels siphoned away advertising dollars from the big magazines that had been the main outlet for writers such as Mailer, Didion and Wolfe.

In this age of analogue media, at the turn of the 20th century, it was above all at times of crisis and traumatic news that the objectivity norm was challenged, as was the case during the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s, the attacks of September 11 and the 2003 Gulf War. It was during the period of the wars in former Yugoslavia that the BBC correspondent Martin Bell, a veteran reporter of conflict from Vietnam to Nicaragua, openly took issue with the objectivity norm and particularly the component of detachment (1997: 16):

When I started out as a war reporter in the mid-sixties I worked in the shadow of my distinguished predecessors and of a long and honourable BBC tradition of distance and detachment. I thought of it then as objective and necessary. I would now call it bystanders’ journalism … I am no longer sure about the notion of objectivity, which seems to me now to be something of an illusion and a shibboleth.

Bell coined the phrase ‘journalism of attachment’ and began a debate that is still running today, not least within the BBC. His plea was not against fact-based or impartial reporting, but for, as he put it, a ‘journalism that cares as well as knows’ and crucially not standing neutral between right and wrong or good and evil (1997). In fact, such arguments have a long tradition, and Bell himself cites the legendary BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby’s passionate coverage of the liberation of the Belsen death camp in 1945. Indeed, he could also have cited the reporting of Martha Gellhorn in Dachau. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who also covered the siege of Sarajevo, does not go as far as dismissing objectivity per se but argues that not every side in a conflict should be treated equally. In the case of Bosnia, she argued against setting up a moral equivalence between the aggressor and victim, saying the West had the duty to stop the Serbs (1996: 16–17). At the heart of such arguments by Amanpour is the assertion that there is no contradiction between a journalist being objective and attached or ‘caring’. The BBC correspondent Fergal Keane has also criticised the media’s framing of traumatic conflict in tones that reflect consensual Western political thinking. Most notably, Keane argued that early reporting ‘bought the line’ that the 1994 Rwandan massacre was part of a tribal war (1995: 6):

The mass of early reporting of the Rwandan killings conveyed the sense that the genocide was the result of some innate inter-ethnic loathing that had erupted into irrational violence … several of the world’s leading newspapers bought the line, in the initial stages, that the killings were a straightforward ‘tribal war’.

But for many others, such as the BBC’s David Loyn, abandoning the ideals of impartiality or being ‘liberated from the yoke of objectivity’ risks becoming lost in moral relativism that threatens the whole business of reporting (2003). In terms of boundary work, Bell’s practice of journalism was seen as being outside what is viewed as acceptable and thus led to what Gieryn (1999) labelled as the genre of ‘expulsion’.

One of the most emotional phases in US journalism was the period of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Many forms of American media engaged in highly jingoistic coverage and adopted the Bush administration’s language of the ‘War on Terror’. News anchors wore pins showing the Stars and Stripes and statistical analyses of broadcast and text content had an overwhelming preponderance of pro-administration sources. British media, primarily the BBC, The Guardian and The Economist, were able to capitalise on growing disillusion with the highly partisan US coverage following September 11, increasing their market share and circulation in the United States through their more objective approach. Analysing September 11, Sreberny (2002: 221) has argued that the combination of what was a global media event watched live by millions on television and the outpouring of emotion created an ‘affective public sphere’. The everyday taken-for-granted norms of journalism were shaken in rushed opinion and emotion, driven by trauma:

The balance seemed to shift between the ordinary work of journalism and a kind of extraordinary writing that people seemed to need to write and others to read – writing as catharsis, writing trauma out of ourselves, trauma talk.

Other academics have identified a series of triggers, which can lead to the normative rules of journalism being challenged or disrupted in favour of emotional coverage. In the wake of September 11, Schudson (2002: 40) attempted to define the criteria that led journalists to move into Hallin’s sphere of consensus in which they cast aside the more normal reporting behaviour or the ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’ (Hallin, 1986). Schudson (2002) identifies three typical circumstances when normative journalistic behaviour breaks down:

1 In moments of tragedy, journalists tend to assume a pastoral role. This is characterised by hushed, reverent tones of television and radio presenters and is evident at times of political assassination (e.g., President Kennedy in 1963), state funerals or the mourning of victims.

2 In moments of public danger, whether from terror attacks or natural disaster (such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005), journalists tend to offer practical advice (e.g., disseminating a public health campaign) and communicate solidarity.

3 In moments of threats to national security (e.g., the botched American invasion of the Bay of Pigs on Cuba in 1961) journalists tend to willingly withhold or temper their reports.

For Schudson, September 11 fulfilled all three criteria – a tragedy a public danger and a threat to national security, which led to President George W. Bush declaring ‘War on Terror’. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Rosenstiel and Kovach (2005) identified similar criteria for what they judged to be the legitimate injection of emotion as they attempted to redefine ‘feeling rules’ associated with journalism. That expression can be traced back to a 1979 paper in which Hochschild argued that people tend to feel in ways ‘appropriate to the situation’, something that is often a result of socially shared, albeit often latent rules (1979: 563). For Rosenstiel and Kovach the suspension of normative professional behaviour is linked to a time when any other reaction would seem forced or out of place. Cronkite’s tears as he read out the news of Kennedy’s death were a case in point – ‘It was simply what it was – a human reaction, difficult to control’ (Rosenstiel & Kovach, 2005). But they also maintain that once journalists have reacted emotionally, they should then compose themselves and address issues of responsibility for how and why things happened. In Rosenstiel and Kovach’s model, journalists should return to the objectivity norm once the news cycle becomes calmer.

Analysis of this crisis in US journalism highlights the inherent contradictions in journalism and what Brent Cunningham, the Managing Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, called its ‘tortured relationship’ with objectivity and conflicting diktats – be disengaged but have impact; be neutral yet investigative; be fair-minded but have an edge (Cunningham, 2003).