The Case for Objective, Investigative, and Local Journalism

The former editor of the Washington Post argues that without democracy, there will be no independent press, and without an independent press, there can be no democracy

By Martin Baron June 5, 2024

Carnegie Reporter Summer 2024

Martin Baron addresses the Boston Globe newsroom in November 2012. Baron was editor of the Globe for 11 years, during which the paper won six Pulitzer prizes, before he joined the Washington Post as executive editor in December 2012. (Credit: Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Martin Baron, a trustee of Carnegie Corporation of New York since 2021, is a longtime journalist and newspaper editor. He ran the newsrooms of the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe before being named executive editor of the Washington Post in 2013. Baron retired from daily journalism in early 2021, after having led newsrooms to 18 Pulitzer Prizes. The following article is an edited excerpt from his first book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, which chronicles the Post’s groundbreaking and award-winning coverage amid the newspaper’s new ownership by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and the election of Donald Trump as president.

For the press to hold power to account today, we will have to commit to what constitutes our moral core. Responsible journalists should be guided by fundamental principles. Among them: We must support and defend democracy. Citizens have a right to self-governance. Without democracy, there will be no independent press, and without an independent press, there can be no democracy. We must work hard and honestly to discover the truth, and we should tell the public unflinchingly what we learn. We should support the right of all citizens to participate in the electoral process without impediment. We should endorse free speech and understand that vigorous debate over policy is essential to democracy. We should favor equitable treatment for everyone, under the law and out of moral obligation, and abundant opportunity for all to attain what they hope for themselves and their families. We owe special attention to the least fortunate in our society, and have a duty to give voice to those who otherwise would not be heard. We must oppose intolerance and hate, and stand against violence, repression, and abuse of power.

But more belongs on our agenda. A few thoughts: We as a profession will need strong, principled, and innovative leadership. We will need to build and maintain institutions whose finances are as sturdy as our values, with the capacity to ensure our commercial future and withstand the persistent, malevolent attacks against us. We must devote far more resources to legal strategy, regularly seeking access to documents that those in power seek to hide, and should more aggressively defend our reputations in court, finally going on the offensive against those who defame us. We must invest far more resources in investigative reporting and acquire new tools that can help us do that work more effectively.

At all times, we will have to hold fast to standards that demonstrate that we are practicing our craft honorably, thoroughly, fairly, with an open mind and with a reverence for evidence over our own opinions. In short, we should practice objective journalism.

In championing “objectivity” in our work, I am swimming against what has become, lamentably, a mighty tide in my profession. No word seems more unpopular today among mainstream journalists.

The principle of objectivity has been under siege for years, but perhaps never more ferociously than during Trump’s presidency and its aftermath. Several primary arguments are leveled against it by my fellow journalists: None of us can honestly claim to be objective, and we shouldn’t profess to be. We all have our opinions. Objectivity also is seen as just another word for neutrality, balance, and so-called both-sidesism or “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism. It pretends, according to this view, that all assertions deserve equal weight, even when the evidence shows they don’t.

Finally, critics argue that objectivity historically excluded the perspectives of those who have long been among the most marginalized in society (and media): women, Black people, Latinos, Asian Americans, Indigenous Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, and others.

Genuine objectivity, however, does not mean any of that. This is what it really means: As journalists, we can never stop obsessing over how to get at the truth — or, to use a less lofty term, “objective reality.” Doing that requires an open mind and rigorous method. We must be more impressed with what we don’t know than with what we know, or think we know. We should not start our work by imagining we have the answers; we need to seek them out. We must be generous listeners and eager learners. We should be fair. And by that, I include being fair to the public: report directly and fearlessly what we find to be fact.

The idea of objective journalism has uncertain origins. But it can be traced to the early twentieth century in the aftermath of World War I, when democracy seemed imperiled and propaganda was developed into a polished instrument for manipulating public opinion and the press during warfare — and, in the United States, for deepening suspicions about marginalized people who were then widely regarded as not fully American.

Renowned journalist and thinker Walter Lippmann helped give currency to the term when he wrote Liberty and the News, published in 1920. In that slim volume, he described a time that sounds remarkably similar to the United States of today. “There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled,” he wrote. The onslaught of news was “helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion.” The public suffered from “no rules of evidence.” He worried over democratic institutions being pushed off their foundations by the media environment of his time.

Lippmann made no assumption that journalists could be freed of their own opinions. He assumed, in fact, just the opposite: They were as subject to biases as anyone else. He proposed an “objective” method for moving beyond them: Journalists should pursue “as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.”

Journalists routinely expect objectivity from others. Like everyone else, we want objective judges. We want objective juries. We want frontline police officers to be objective when they make arrests and detectives to be objective in assessing evidence. We want prosecutors to evaluate cases objectively, with no prejudice or preexisting agendas. Without objectivity, there can be no equity in law enforcement, as abhorrent abuses have demonstrated all too often.

We want doctors to be objective in diagnosing the medical conditions of their patients, uncontaminated by bigotry or baseless hunches. We want medical researchers and regulators to be objective in determining whether new drugs might work and can be safely consumed. We want scientists to be objective in evaluating the impact of chemicals in the soil, air, and water. Objectivity among science and medical professionals is at the very heart of our faith in the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the medicines we take.

In business, we want objectivity, too. Applicants for bank loans and credit cards should be evaluated on valid criteria, not on biases about race or ethnicity or other factors that are similarly irrelevant.

Objectivity in all these fields, and others, gets no argument from journalists. We accept it, even insist on it by seeking to expose transgressions. Journalists should insist on it for ourselves as well. The public expects that of us. It has every right to. If we hope to effectively hold the powerful to account, we will have to show that we are objective in how we go about our work.

The lightning-fast spread of misinformation, disinformation, and crackpot conspiracy theories of today makes the pursuit of truth more essential, and more difficult. Efforts to deceive are more numerous and sophisticated, resources dedicated to deception more abundant. The field of journalism must respond by becoming more investigative in nature.

Investigative reporting has been a ripe target for cost-cutting in an industry where resources are scarce. It is expensive, takes a lot of time, cannot guarantee results (or even a story), and may not quicken the digital traffic that is prized currency in the Internet era. When journalists abdicate their role as watchdogs, however, unscrupulous behavior is encouraged. Readers have demonstrated, with the purchase of subscriptions, that they want wrongdoing brought to light.

News organizations will need adequate staff, greater technical prowess, and state-of-the-art technological tools to penetrate the dark arts now increasingly deployed to instantly spread lies and baseless suspicions with the aim of political and commercial gain. They will have to collaborate more effectively among themselves and with independent specialists who possess expertise in artificial intelligence and the manipulation of social networks. Fabrications of every sort, including visual images, inevitably will become more frequent, dangerous, and challenging to detect and disprove.

While investigative reporting is thriving in some corners of journalism, particularly at the national level, it is being starved to death in others. Local news outlets continue to see their primary sources of revenue dry up, leaving them poorly resourced to fund ambitious journalism of any type. Too many local newspapers have been taken over by private equity firms and hedge funds. Those owners seem determined to milk their properties for every last penny they can cough up, without regard for the public interest. Investigative journalism at the local level is threatened anew.

The future of local investigative reporting may depend heavily on whether new journalism nonprofits receive adequate support from readers and philanthropists as well as on collaborations between national news organizations and local ones. The national investigative nonprofit ProPublica has established investigative reporting hubs around the country and joined forces with local newsrooms on accountability journalism, with impressive results. The New York Times announced in April 2022 that its former top editor, Dean Baquet, would head a fellowship program to promote local investigative reporting, with projects offered without charge to local print, digital, and broadcast outlets.

“The decline of local investigative reporting is a national tragedy,” New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger aptly put it at the time. “It means that fewer and fewer people across the country have access to essential information about their communities — too often there is no one to track school board meetings; comb through court documents; or reveal the significance of everyday developments in towns, cities, and states. No watchdog to keep local governments honest. . . . As a result, it’s almost certain that corruption, injustice, and wrongdoing go unnoticed.”

Martin Baron is a longtime journalist and newspaper editor. He ran the newsrooms of the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe before taking over the Washington Post in 2013. His role in launching an investigation of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of sexual abuse by clergy was portrayed in the Academy Award–winning movie Spotlight. He retired from daily journalism in early 2021 and now splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City. Collision of Power is his first book.