Putting the 'Odds' over the 'Stakes': How 'View from Nowhere' Journalism Fails to Counter the Threats to Democracy

Heidi Siegmund Cuda and the Byline Supplement team in conversation with New York University Professor of Journalism, Jay Rosen, about the common problems in reporting in the US and UK

Professor Jay Rosen. Photo: Everett Collection/Alamy

Those attending July’s Byline Festival will get to hear from Rosen in person.

With two elections looming on both sides of the Atlantic, Byline Times co-founder Peter Jukes, Editor Hardeep Matharu, and Political Editor Adam Bienkov hosted a robust conversation on the failure of the political media class and the 'view from nowhere' with NYU Professor Jay Rosen, who encouraged people to support local and independent journalism, while also engaging with others in real life. He also encouraged political journalists in both countries to stop focusing on the horse race and start focusing on the stakes.

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‘The View from Nowhere’

Hardeep Matharu: Today, we wanted to take the time to discuss the media's role in how both the UK and US have come to the political junction that they are at. Jay, you have a very compelling analysis of the ‘view from nowhere’. Can you unpick that a little bit and explain how that fed into not only the Trump years, but where America finds itself now politically?

Jay Rosen: The view from nowhere is a kind of a self-limiting device that journalists use to generate public reputation. In a way, it is a form of advertisement, in which you try to persuade people to trust your account by saying, ‘Look, I don't have a stake here, I don't have an ideology. I don't have a religion I'm protecting. I don't have an agenda. I'm just telling you the way it is. So you should believe it because I am free of all ideological or political commitments’. 

And this way of generating trust and generating reputation also fits well with a business model in which you're trying to reach everyone and trying not to be upsetting to one part of the market and or another. And so the view from nowhere is my name for trying to generate trust without any sense of what you yourself believe in. And it's become an issue because of what's happened to political journalism in the United States. 

The practices of the political press in America rest on a picture of the two-party system, in which both parties operate in roughly the same way and compete during elections for power. In between elections, they compete for public opinion. And the Democrats and the Republicans, they operated in similar ways. And there's this kind of symmetry to this system that underlies the ability of the view from nowhere to operate and make sense. 

And that system worked fairly well from the end of World War Two to the present, in the sense that the two parties agreed on how the political fight was to be conducted. So for example, you didn't — excuse the expression — f**k around with the voting system itself. You didn't try to gain political advantage by allowing some people to vote and making it harder for other people to vote. That was just something that the two parties agreed was neutral territory where you just made sure that the election was secure. And something that you definitely never did is refuse to leave power when you lose an election. 

I mean, that was an example of a belief deeply woven into American politics. That wasn't a law, but it was a tradition. And what's happened over the last few years is that symmetry between the two parties has broken down. We have one party now that's fairly a radical, populist movement, generally called the MAGA movement. And that situation – in which you have one normal party, and one that's breaking all these informal rules – has created a crisis in journalism, because the practices in journalism rested on that picture of politics as two parties, roughly the same. 

And to round this out to answer your question Hardeep, the view from nowhere makes it very hard to adjust to this collapse of the symmetry in our political system. And this is something that everybody in journalism is struggling with now.

HM: I’d like to ask you a bit more about the sort of the observation involved in the view from nowhere, because as journalists, we get this a lot, ‘we want objective people who are on the ground, who can give us the facts and the information so we can make up our own minds’. 

And within that, there seems to be a notion that the role of the observer is very important. But as you say, that collapses when circumstances unfold on which you can't be objective, where the rules are fundamentally changing. 

JR: Yes, well, the view from nowhere is mixed up with lots of other things that are desirable, and that I would be supportive of myself. For example, finding the facts before you draw conclusions, trying to get beyond the limited perspective of your own upbringing to identify with other people, who had a different life than you did. 

That takes a kind of objectivity. Depicting the world the way it is, and not the way we would like it to be. That's a really important skill for journalists to have. All of these things are reasonable. And I think they're part of what we mean by excellence in journalism, a journalist is able to do these kinds of things to distance themselves from immediate reaction and draw a deeper portrait than they otherwise would. 

So those things involved in the practices of objectivity are strengths of the American system. But when you come to a situation like the one that we’re in today, we have a radical movement using rage at the press to generate energy that fuels the MAGA movement. 

And under conditions like that, we need a press that can figure out how to defend democracy as it is being attacked and eroded by a potent movement. 

And if in that situation, journalists say, ‘Well, we can't do that — we have to remain objective’, and they feel they can't defend the democratic system against the attack on it, then obviously the view from nowhere has crippled American journalism in some ways. And that's a conclusion that I do a lot of my work as a press critic from. It is based on that sort of view of the political moment.

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‘Working the Refs’

HM: Why do these journalists find this such a challenging thing to take on? Obviously, in many ways, the Trump administration is unprecedented, but is it also something about how that class, that profession, is seen within American politics and society?

JR: Because the method they had for generating trust and confidence in their work required them not to take a stand on anything, that's what they're used to. They've also been subject to a decades-long attack that usually goes by the name  ‘working the refs’, in which the right-wing has been extremely successful. It sometimes happens on the left, too, but it's more characteristic of the right, where you complain endlessly and automatically about media bias. 

So you get inside the journalist’s head in a way, and they try to adjust for that before it even happens. And it becomes part of their self-definition, and they begin to believe it. And this working the refs tactic, which has been around for decades, creates a hesitation in our journalists, and the view from nowhere is another way of living and being able to conduct yourself under conditions of constant attack that you are too biased. 

And those attacks are themselves a form of politics, a way of doing politics, that cripples the press and creates an alternative media to it, which now is a huge factor in American politics. It increasingly pushes what we used to call the mainstream press into a corner. And these are fights and developments that we confront every day in American politics in the media system.

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‘Verification in Reverse’ 

HM: Can you offer us one or two striking examples of this at work?

JR: One example, I call ‘verification and reverse’. In many ways, the first appearance of Donald Trump on the screen of American politics was his involvement in the Birther Controversy, in which a large number of people opposed to the left in every way decided to make a huge issue out of ‘was Barack Obama born in the United States’?

This is an interesting moment in American politics and journalism, because the fact that Obama was born in the United States as a proper citizen is as proven as anything can get in American journalism. There's a document that says he was born at this time at this place, and there is no way of questioning that. And yet, Donald Trump began to take that claim that there was something wrong with Obama's birth certificate — that it may be he was actually a Polynesian or a citizen of Uganda, and he generated political momentum and controversy by questioning a fact that was unquestionably true. 

And so if verification is a basic practice in journalism, where you take something that may be true, and you nail it down with documents, facts, interviews, evidence, that’s like the basic skill in journalism is verification. So verification in reverse is taking something that's already been nailed down, introducing doubt about it, and then taking the doubt and confusion and chaos and anger that's released by that action, it becomes power for your movement and you take off from there. 

This is the kind of politics that Trump has been using for years, and that moment where he became a Birther himself and questioned Obama's right to be President was really the dawn of his presence on the political stage. And that is a very difficult tactic to counter unless you understand that the entire democratic system is under attack, when verification in reverse becomes a normal tactic.

HM: It's been interesting in recent years, because when it comes to Brexit or cronyism, or the state of Britain, the New York Times has often carried articles that you wouldn't find in this country. And we look to it as the ultimate standard in journalism. Can you talk about how the New York Times has navigated the Trump years and the political landscape? Is it fair to say that the inability to grapple with this problem has contributed to the current moment, where America is still very much on this knife edge of Trump potentially coming back, even though he’s currently on trial in New York.

JR: Potentially coming back, potentially winning the election, you could even say he's ahead right now. But as for the Times, I sometimes call the New York Times a liberal newspaper that is scandalised by itself. 

In many ways, it operates like the Guardian; it comes out of New York, which is a liberal city. It is liberal in its view of culture, and in its answer to the question of who should be included, for example, in culture. But it's also very suspicious in a lot of ways of its liberal readership. 

While at the same time, that readership is more and more the economic engine of the New York Times because more than 60% of its revenue now is driven by subscriptions. And yet, those subscribers are, for the most part, a kind of liberal clientele that the Times both tries to serve, but also tries to push away in order to show everyone, including Republicans and right-wingers, that ‘we don't take stands, we don't have an ideology, we are that ourselves — the view from nowhere’. 

And the term that they are now using to describe that system is ‘independence’. They don't use terms like objectivity. They don't use ‘impartial’ too often. But what they now want to keep saying is, ‘we are independent of every source of influence that there might be in the system’. 

And that requires them to view Trump and Biden or the Democratic Party and Republican Party now as people who don't influence us, and it tries to demonstrate that independence over and over. And that can lead to serious distortions, because a balanced portrait of an imbalanced phenomena is itself a distortion. 

And so we constantly have these wars and this criticism rises up continuously, that the New York Times, while an outstanding institution in so many ways, and easily the leading institution in the American press by far, is kind of addicted to ‘both sides’ coverage. They of course deny that, but many of their readers see it. And there's also underneath that, a generational divide that is becoming larger and larger.

Adam Bienkov: I can see quite strong parallels with what Jay is saying in the UK. But of course, the key difference is that, unlike the United States, where the print press is at least trying to be impartial and the broadcast media is heavily biased, it's an opposite situation in the United Kingdom, where we have an incredibly partisan, and frankly politicized press, and we have rules, which are at least supposed to impose strict impartiality requirements on broadcast media. We can discuss whether or not that actually happens in reality, but yes, it’s a completely different situation when it comes to what used to be known as Fleet Street in the UK — the biggest selling of which are over on the right of British politics. 

And we have a press lobby, where all the main political journalists in the UK are based within Parliament, all based in the heart of power, they have daily contact with the Prime Minister's spokespeople. And that closeness to power, inevitably I think, does colour the coverage that British political journalists have in the press. Not just in right-wing newspapers, but across all political press, as well.

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Good Copy

HM: For us, the Boris Johnson years are  the closest equivalent at the moment to Trump in America. So much happened — Brexit, the pandemic, Ukraine war, the economy — are there a couple of examples that really stand out to you during that era? 

AB: I think Johnson is probably the perfect example of that, because he started off as a journalist. He was a reporter for the Times newspaper in London. He was actually sacked from there for inventing a quote. In a normal media ecosystem, that would have been the end of his career, but actually, he continues to be promoted. He went on to work for the Daily Telegraph, where he was a correspondent in Brussels covering the EU. 

And that's how he actually made his name in journalism, by essentially inventing stories about barmy EU policies. And far from his dishonesty ruining his career, actually it furthered his career. He became a significant media figure. He was invited onto BBC programs. And so, he later went on to become Mayor of London. 

Throughout this whole period, he had a long record of dishonesty, a long record of making things up. But because he was a creature of the media, because he was part of the political press in the UK, he was always seen as one of the guys. He was never really held to account in a way that other politicians who don’t have that background were. 

That completely coloured the coverage and allowed him to get away with things that other politicians wouldn't have been allowed to get away with. And that, of course, culminated in what we saw when he finally did become Prime Minister. He was completely unsuited for the job. 

All of the clues and signs were there for many years, they were there when he was Mayor of London, they were there when he was a journalist making up quotes in the Times. But this was just not properly reported by the British press, who frankly saw him as good copy. 

They saw him as something that sold newspapers, and got people to watch TV news bulletins, in much the same way as Trump is often similar in the States. And I think that’s a big part of why we got into the mess that we did with Johnson. 

And of course, why we got into the mess that we did with Brexit, when Johnson led the campaign for us to leave the European Union. And the coverage of that campaign was heavily personality-focused. It was about what Johnson was saying his relationship with David Cameron was, it wasn't really about the issues. It wasn't about the single market, there was virtually no discussion during that Brexit referendum of the situation in Northern Ireland, despite that causing huge problems since we've left the EU. That simply wasn't discussed, not just by the press, but even the BBC barely focused on that issue at all. I think that all of that comes back to how Johnson was treated, and how politics is generally treated in the UK.

HM: It's really interesting, because both from what Jay is saying with the US and what we're talking about here in the UK, both are forms of complicity of the media but from different angles.

In America, it's this need for supposed objectivity, which is what the media class has always been used to. And in the UK, there's this notion of proximity to somebody like Johnson, and therefore you can't have that level of scrutiny of a figure that has a personality that you quite like and adds some flair to your work. But should we just talk quickly about the BBC as well? Many people are concerned about its trajectory. It seems to have really collapsed as our standard bearer of impartiality. Is there a way back?

AB: We've always prided ourselves in the UK on  having a supposedly impartial national broadcaster in the BBC. And there are rules which are supposed to be enforced in terms of impartiality. There are a couple of problems with that. The first is, it's impossible for any outfit to be completely impartial. What actually tends to happen in the UK is that the BBC is under a lot of pressure. And a lot of that pressure comes from the printed press, so there has been a sort of decades-long campaign to undermine the BBC, as Jay was talking about ‘working the ref’.