The Journalist, the Scientist, and Objectivity

Abstract

This essay relates the history of objectivity in journalism to the historical development of objectivity in the sciences as worked out by Daston and Galison (Objectivity, Zone Books, New York, 2007/2010). While the nineteenth century history of journalism in America increasingly focused increasingly on facts, in the twentieth century, especially after World War I, it became clear that while objectivity was both a moral imperative and an epistemic ideal, objectivity would not always lead to truth. More recently, as this work argues, objectivity in science and in journalism have developed in parallel, at a time when both face major challenges in the ethics and epistemology of the digital image and its manipulation.