An essay on objectivity

The essay concludes:

Television news can never be completely objective. Due to the time constraints of the medium journalists are required to select stories and sources from the infinite number of possibilities. This process is done in a subjective way based on the journalist judging the story and sources against a set of subjective news values. The analysis above has also shown the negative impacts of commercial pressures, concentration of ownership and public relations on objective reporting. These factors directly oppose McQuail’s definition of objectivity given in section 1.

Due to the different ways in which Internet news – with its potentially unlimited number of encoders and back regions -is constructed and because the Internet has no time constraints this medium allows for a more objective representation of news. This is the case when assessing news on the Internet as a whole rather than on specific websites and from the above analysis of the Now Public website it may be the case that if people rely on a single website to receive news then they will have a less objective view of news.

The effects of Internet news on mainstream media and public opinion are much more contested and with more people using the Internet and new websites being developed, its effects are constantly changing. The Internet has the potential to generate audiences much larger than television, yet this audience, for the most part, will be fragmented. Consequently, in the short-term the impact of Internet news will always be less than that of television unless there is a consensus portrayed over multiple websites or when mainstream media replicate stories developed on the web.

As a consequence of objectivity not being encoded in the same way on the Internet as in television news and because many of the reports are compiled by non-professional journalists, many people are less trusting of news reported on websites which are not representations of mainstream media outlets. Thus, people are more likely to take Hall’s (1980) negotiated or oppositional view of Internet news when compared to television news. Furthermore, in an attempt to make sense of the information they access on the Internet and put it in context people may turn back to traditional sources of media. The future effect that the Internet will have on news reception as opposed to its potential, therefore, is not clear.

The most recent statistics show that 60% of adults use the Internet daily (Office of National Statistics, 2007) and 65% of households have Internet access (Office of National Statistics, 2008). The trends for both these figures indicate that they are likely to increase while at the same time newspaper sales are declining (Guardian, 2008). These trends would seem to suggest that the Internet as a medium for communicating news will become of increasing importance. Accordingly, the model of Internet representation and reception of news outlined above may come under treat as ‘it would be naïve to assume that powerful conglomerates will not protect their own interests as they enter this new media market place’ (Jenkins, 2002, p.157). As Internet audiences increase it may be the case that a further corporatisation of the Internet takes place and with it an attempt to create a corporate back region, front region and encoding process similar to that of television news. It is also the case, however, that audiences now have ‘greater power and autonomy as they enter into the new knowledge culture’ (ibid, p.158). It is these conflicting positions which may dominate the contest of how news is represented and received in the future.