Gaye Tuchman's Criticism Of Factuals

Objectivity is a key ideal of professionalism for a journalist that refers to impartial, accurate and value-free news, opposing biased and opinion-led reports. Journalists must consider the consequences of their work, and in order to avoid such consequences as critical onslaught, missed deadlines and libel suits, Tuchman suggests that they use strategic rituals as defence mechanisms from such risks. 4 rituals are proposed (Gaye Tuchman, 1972, Vol. 77); “the presentation of conflicting possibilities, the presentation of supporting evidence, the use of quotation marks and structuring information in an appropriate sequence.” Tuchman takes a cynical stance, using the word “strategic” to suggest that these rituals are not to achieve objectivity,

In this essay I am going to examine Tuchman’s criticism of the strategic rituals and their limitations in creating objective news in relation to how the audience may receive the information and how these rituals are used to claim factual truth in news reports.

The presentation of conflicting possibilities is the politically sensible practise of telling both sides of the story to avoid favouring one side. A limitation of this practise in achieving an impartial report is that by presenting conflicting views there is a possibility that neither argument is correct nor that another truthful view is not included in the story. An example of this can be seen in the Michael Brown shooting incident in August 2014 that caused uproar in protest about police inequality towards African-Americans in the USA. TV host, Bill O’Reilly, argued that the story had

This is limited due to the careful selection of supporting evidence, which can be manipulated to support one argument over another. In a Fox News interview on the Michael Brown situation, Bill O’Reilly uses statistics as supporting evidence to show he is being transparent using “hard information as it comes out”. He quoted the FBI statistics that state; in “2012 there were 12 million total arrests in America”, and the accounts of police shooting were only 420 per year, on average. “Of all police shootings 42% are white, 32% black and 20% Hispanic” (Bill O’Reilly, 2014). Statistics demand the attention of an audience and are a powerful tool in persuasion; Bill O’Reilly uses them to show how “infinitesimal” the situation is; supporting his claim that America should not use the Brown situation to judge America’s police treatment to African-Americans at large. The use of statistics effectively supports his truth claim as being unprejudiced, however this evidence could be easily manipulated to reflect and opposing view; others may consider 420 police shootings a year as a large number. Therefore, as evidence can be exploited it means that the ritual of presenting supporting evidence does not lead to an objective report. Altschull (1984, p.254) states, “the content of the press is directly correlated with the