Journalism Professor’s Suspension Shows the Hypocrisy of “Objectivity”

Outcry is spreading against Northwestern University’s decision to cancel the fall classes of professor Steven Thrasher, who was hired as its first ever endowed chair for social justice in reporting.

Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism suspended Thrasher months after he took part in a pro-Palestine encampment on campus last spring, in a move that appears to be related both to his defense of students in the encampment and to pro-Palestine statements he made in his speeches and social media posts.

This week more than 1,900 journalists, health professionals and academics — including me — published an open letter to the leadership of Northwestern University expressing concern that the school is “targeting Dr. Steven Thrasher for his political speech against Israel’s war in Gaza and for defending those students who also stand against it.”

Northwestern University has declined to comment on Thrasher’s situation, stating it won’t comment on an ongoing investigation.

Thrasher has published an in-depth column of his own explaining the conditions of his suspension. In it, he writes:

In April, students on our campus set up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment. I spent five days talking with them, saying Passover prayers with them, learning from them and—most importantly when I saw Northwestern police getting ready to physically assault them—placing my body between them and the assailants. For this, I was beaten up by Northwestern cops, leaving me in physical pain for several weeks.

Thrasher’s involvement in the Gaza solidarity encampment became politicized in the national arena when the House of Representatives’s Committee on Education & the Workforce grilled Northwestern University President Michael Schill about the protests in May. At the hearing, Republican Rep. Jim Banks referred to Thrasher as a “goon” and demanded to know whether he and other professors who supported student protesters would be fired.

At the time, Schill declined to comment on individual faculty and defended students’ right to peaceful protest.

Two months later, after students had gone home for the summer, the Northwestern police filed misdemeanor charges associated with allegations of “obstructing a police officer” against Thrasher and two other faculty members, but the state of Illinois declined to prosecute.

In July, after the charges were dropped, Northwestern quietly informed Thrasher that his fall classes were canceled. An email from Medill Dean Charles Whitaker of the journalism school let him know he was under investigation due to student complaints about his focus on Palestine in one of his classes, what the email called “intemperate and inflammatory dustups” on social media, and Thrasher’s stance on the issue of journalistic objectivity.

Whitaker wrote to Thrasher that his “statements about the standards of journalism—are antithetical to our profession and values as a University, including but not limited to your declaration in Deering Meadow that you do not teach your students to be ‘objective.’”

This double standard is simple but insidious: You can be biased so long as you don’t undermine status quo power structures.

The “Objectivity Wars” Come to Campus

I can attest to the ironic honesty of at least part of Dean Whitaker’s statement: Thrasher certainly teaches his students to question the very notion of objectivity. He has been teaching my book, The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, since it came out in 2019. The View from Somewhere offers a history and critique of the concept of journalistic “objectivity,” tracing it from its origins in the capitalist advertising model of early newspapers to its emergence as a formal ethical standard in the 1920s and ‘30s when it was nearly immediately weaponized against labor organizers and used to gatekeep professional journalism.

For the 100 years that it has been a key principle of mainstream U.S. journalism, “objectivity” has been neither a pure aspiration nor a clearly defined set of practices. Indeed, objectivity has more often been a performance — a mode of upholding white, patriarchal and cisgender thinking, or a bludgeon with which to punish Black and Brown, queer and trans, disabled and geographically marginalized reporters, and those who organize for their rights as workers.

The first case I could find in which a reporter was fired for allegedly violating standards of “objectivity” was an Associated Press attack on a labor organizer attempting to unionize the newsroom.

Dean Whitaker must know that conversations about the validity of objectivity as a journalistic aim are happening in Northwestern’s own classrooms. He must be familiar with the debate over objectivity, and with how that debate has always been classed, gendered and racialized. He has almost certainly heard the arguments for a more nuanced approach to journalistic ethics in the 21st century.

Targeting Thrasher for not teaching objectivity is, quite literally, a textbook case of the double standard that has always been imposed around this concept. This double standard is simple but insidious: You can be biased so long as you don’t undermine status quo power structures. Then, objectivity becomes a weapon of silence.

Students Question “Objectivity” Because It Doesn’t Resonate With Their Lived Reality

My personal stakes in Thrasher’s story are high: Thrasher is my friend and one of the most stalwart supporters I have had in the journalism world. In fact, we were first brought together by our shared interest in a practice of journalism that is ethical, anti-racist and justice-oriented.

I met Thrasher in 2017, shortly after I was fired from my job at Marketplace/American Public Media for questioning the notion of objectivity in the age of Donald Trump. In the blog post I was fired over, I advocated for a journalism that does not accept or reinforce racism or transphobia — a journalism that has a moral center. The next week, Thrasher reached out to me and took me to lunch in New York. Over the years he’s connected me to editors, speaking gigs and a literary agent, and we have grown together intellectually and as friends.

In addition to being dedicated to Thrasher as a friend and a beacon of solidarity, I am also a Northwestern alum, and I have traveled to Medill’s journalism classrooms as a guest speaker for three out of the last five years. I have seen at close range how professor Thrasher teaches, and the conversations that students are having about objectivity.

It is ironic that Northwestern would nominally suspend Thrasher for questioning the notion of objectivity, when in both 2022 and 2023, The View from Somewhere was assigned to the incoming class of Northwestern’s own journalism students in their fall seminar. It has been assigned as required reading not just for the journalism students at Northwestern but also for all students at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, as well as in courses at dozens of other schools, including Columbia and the University of Missouri. The debate around objectivity is lively on college campuses, as it should be, and it is certainly not a legitimate cause for a professor’s suspension.

When I teach my book, I often speak about scholar Daniel Hallin’s “spheres of legitimate controversy.” This framework, developed through his in-depth study of coverage of the U.S. war in Vietnam, argues that journalism is always participating in an unspoken process of legitimizing certain viewpoints and debates while casting others out as deviant and unspeakable. Hallin identifies three spheres — consensus (assumed and often unspoken shared values), legitimate controversy (issues worthy of open debate) and deviance (conversations and viewpoints that cannot be included or considered in objective journalism) — that shift and change alongside social movements. Acts of journalism as well as education contribute to shaping what conversations fall into which sphere.

In my experience, students have no complaints with questioning objectivity, and they often find Hallin’s spheres illuminating. After all, they are in a confusing media landscape: The news outlets they’ve been told to trust have betrayed them with everything from racist reporting on police violence to equivocating on climate change. Students know that those who have claimed to be “fair and balanced” have in reality often been vitriolic and selectively biased in their coverage.

The sphere of legitimate controversy is completely different in The New York Times than it is on YouTube — and this disjunct exposes the constructed nature of the entire frame, of any frame.

What’s more, the line between individual journalists’ private views and the institutions they work for has become extremely blurry: Reporters are expected to have social media personas, to be known as individuals even as they are also expected never to appear biased. When I was fired from Marketplace, it was in part because I pointed out that this is an impossible ask, particularly for those of us whose identities or communities are under attack.

So long as “objective” journalists and professors uphold and validate status quo viewpoints, they can remain in their jobs. Those who violate unspoken norms are derided as biased and punished.

Given this confounding landscape, it’s easy for Gen Z-ers to see that there’s quite simply more than one way to tell any story, and that it matters who is doing the telling: It matters where and how the storyteller is positioned. The mainstream newspaper, television and radio news stories that young people consume about everything from trans people to the genocide in Palestine stand in sharp contrast to the stories they are exposed to via social media. As a result, whom to trust and how to be trusted, are core questions for them.

Incredibly enough, many of them still want to become journalists. I have spoken with thousands of journalism students about the problems with objectivity over the last five years and found them to be nothing but curious, engaged, self-aware and eager to create journalism to a high ethical standard that makes a difference in the world.

But unlike some of their professors (and, apparently, deans), most journalism students are aware that the ethics of today invite a different kind of thinking about subjectivity, individualism and interconnection. They are concerned about whether they are being extractive — i.e. using the painful lived experiences of marginalized and oppressed people to advance their own stories or careers, or exposing people to harm by photographing or writing about them against their will. They are anxious about trust and verification. They are aware of the dangers of social media and disinformation, and they are also eager to unlearn racism, classism, and other forms of bias that previous generations of mainstream journalists deemed irrelevant to journalistic ethics and merely “politically correct.”

These students are eager to do journalism that makes the world better. Their environment has taught them not to trust the performance of objectivity that corporate news sells its viewers. They understand that we are all a part of shaping the world through our stories.

The Palestine Exception in the “Objectivity Wars”

Importantly, students are now watching a genocide unfold in real time that is largely being reported on the ground, by directly impacted people: Palestinian journalists who are often the only ones willing and able to speak the truth from inside of Gaza.

Most international journalists left the Gaza Strip just days after the current assault began, along with nearly all other international organizations except for those involved in providing direct humanitarian aid. This is a classic example of the conundrum of mainstream “objectivity”: If no one close to the story can be trusted, but the only people who know the story are the ones who are close to the story, can the story be told? Thanks to social media, the answer is now yes, of course. Palestinian journalists are persisting in an impossible situation and deserve the same legitimacy and protection as journalists everywhere.

Here is part of what Thrasher said about Palestinian journalists in the speech he gave at the Northwestern encampment in April (the speech for which he is now being punished): “I teach my students relational journalism. But one of the many lessons Palestinian journalists have taught me — at great sacrifice — is that journalism can be an act of love.”

Rejecting objectivity is a rejection of the doublespeak of leaders who claim neutrality even as they legitimize violence against the most vulnerable.

The Israeli military has killed at least 143 Palestinian journalists and media workers since October 7, 2023, with complete impunity, and countless more have been arrested in Gaza and the West Bank. Social media reports have often accused Israel of targeted attacks on journalists, allegations that have been investigated and reinforced by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International.

Thrasher’s social media feeds — another of the named reasons for his suspension — have included publicizing each one of these deaths. He decided to name the dead as an act of loving solidarity and social media reportage in the absence of intense interest by major news organizations.

But as we well know, Palestine is a third rail on many college campuses, let alone in newsrooms. In spaces where a robust debate might be carried out about homophobia or U.S. racism, Palestine and Zionism cannot be spoken about without fierce backlash. This is often called “the Palestine exception” to free speech. And Thrasher has a front row seat to the exception, having taught social justice and LGBT journalism to accolades for the last few years at Northwestern.

He writes, “While university administration had been supportive of me when I applied social justice journalism to race, LGBTQ identity, and infectious disease, it did not like when I began applying this same analytic to the genocide in Gaza and the obliteration of our journalism colleagues in Palestine.”

Thrasher is not actually being punished for failing to be objective, nor for his use of social media. He is being punished for failing to adhere to an unspoken standard that denies overt discussion of U.S.-supported settler colonialism in campuses and in newsroom. The sphere of legitimate controversy in the U.S. has not, until very recently, included a robust debate about Palestinian self-determination and Israeli settler colonialism as such.

Journalism Beyond Objectivity Is Inevitable

There is an ethical emptiness to the pro-objectivity argument, not necessarily in theory (in that theoretical universe in which a “view from nowhere” is real) but in practice.

So long as “objective” journalists and professors uphold and validate status quo viewpoints, they can remain in their jobs. Those who violate unspoken norms are derided as biased and punished.

A hundred and sixty years ago, one might violate the norms in a newsroom by naming the injustice of slavery. A hundred years ago, one might be seen as biased for questioning lynchings and Jim Crow laws. Fifty years ago, serious consideration of gay rights was in the sphere of deviance. My work documents journalists like Thrasher in every era who strained against the limits of objectivity and pointed out its hollow core.

Thankfully, there is a robust historical and international practice of journalism beyond objectivity, a practice Thrasher points to in his column. He calls it relational journalism, and interdependent journalism, and journalism as an act of love.

In my experience, current students of journalism are keenly interested in these possibilities: They want to learn about the work of anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells, Black labor rights journalist Marvel Cooke, queer movement journalist Andy Kopkind. They want to build organizations and practices that allow journalism to openly serve justice and liberation for the most targeted.

Rejecting objectivity is not a reactionary stance, but a principled response to the notion’s obvious limitations, grounded in a rigorous study of history. It is also a rejection of the doublespeak of leaders who claim neutrality even as they legitimize violence against the most vulnerable. Unfortunately, we have such leaders on both the right and the left, and we also find this kind of leadership in the most liberal media and academic institutions.

Young people who are putting their bodies on the line for an end to climate catastrophe, for the liberation of gender and for a free Palestine deserve a journalism that can live up to their rigorous ethical standards and their visionary expectations of what is possible. They deserve better than the punitive hypocrisy of Northwestern’s current leadership. They deserve professors like Steven Thrasher, whose life’s work is an act of love, and role models like the journalists in Palestine who have given their lives for the truth.