The Objectivity Bias

The objectivity bias

When I was 15 years old and was about to graduate from high school, I worked as a journalism apprentice at El Espectador. This was the most respected and oldest-running newspaper in Colombia. It was founded in 1887 as a Liberal outlet in defiance of our previous 1886 Constitution, instituted by one of the most Conservative regimes that emerged in Latin America during the second half of the 19th century. El Espectador bravely soldiered on for 134 years, surviving being shut down by a military dictatorship (1956), the murder of its Editor In Chief, Guillermo Cano, (1986) by Pablo Escobar, and the leveling of its headquarters by a Medellín Cartel bombing (1989). At the time of this account, it had announced that it might permanently forgo paper circulation and move from a daily to a weekly online publication, something akin to a blog.

The possible demise of El Espectador is not a uniquely Colombian phenomenon. Other flagship Spanish-language newspapers, like El Pais in Spain, have moved online, with somewhat lackluster results. Of course, there are plenty of explanations for why newspapers everywhere are disappearing. I believe one of them is that they remain attached to the “objectivity” dogma that has governed traditional media since the first modern newspapers emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment.

Later, as I majored in Communications & Journalism at Javeriana University in Bogota, the same “objectivity” mantra was relentlessly hammered into my head for five years. It turned out to be wrong, and I dare submit the death of so many newspapers as Exhibit A. There is no such thing as objectivity in this world, there is only a complex, ever-adapting sum of subjectivities. If you can boil these down into narratives that bring about positive change for human collectives, then there is hope for humanity. The rest is just random, mindless, heartless storytelling.

My college professors insisted on this “objectivity” mantra, but I was never able to swallow it entirely. It seemed tasteless, generalizing, pertaining to no one. Three decades later, I finally understood that “objectivity” is the main culprit behind the mainstream media’s current crisis. The idea of readers, listeners, or followers as a sanitized collective is a postmodern illusion; the likeness of nobody, the furthest most expression of the Spirit of Untruth. Dismissing what motivates individuals and force-feeding them into binary or polarized pre-packaged ideological structures remains hypocritical hubris, and the media has paid a considerable price for embracing these sirens’ songs.

The internet and social media have given voice to the masses. Federico Mayor Zaragoza, former head of UNESCO, once told me, “Since the advent of the internet, no one is obliged to accept the inexorable.” Yet a cacophony of voices leads only to chaos because it restricts our capacity to find meaning amidst complexity. This entails a huge opportunity for the media, which could stop feeding the chaos by listening deeply to multiple perspectives from audiences and present true meaning and insight for these challenging times. This is why Cynefin’s potential for media and communications is revolutionary. Cynefin is the appropriate framework, and the media should start paying attention.

As I was choosing a specialization, I was weighing traditional journalism, internal corporate communications, and strategic communications/education through audio/visual channels. Although I loved writing, and held fond memories of my years at El Espectador, I could not follow this path. It seemed absurd, unimaginably dull, shallow, and soulless. Thank God I chose the latter. The toxic, politically correct, highly pasteurized “objective” narratives offered by the mainstream media, breed populism, polarization and ultimately lead to chaos. They have brought about a rebellious need for texture, granularity, and bluntness amongst the masses.