As I’ve mentioned before, “transparency is the new objectivity” has become a popular notion in media criticism circles. The idea is that people are more apt to trust journalists if they make clear their personal biases — “this is where I’m coming from”, as Jay Rosen says — than if the journalists claim to be objective.

But what happens if people distrust you precisely because they know where you are coming from?

For a non-journalist example, consider the case of FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz, who said in an interview in The Wrap that the FTC will look at whether it should loosen antitrust laws for newspapers as they struggle to survive. On True/Slant, Michael Roston pointed out that Leibowitz is married to a Washington Post columnist, which Roston cites as reason to be skeptical of Leibowitz’s judgment on the issue. Roston does point out that the marriage is no secret, as it is mentioned in Leibowitz’s bio and has been addressed by Marcus, and that Marcus’ work for the Post doesn’t overlap with her husband’s at the FTC. Nonetheless, Roston writes:

It’s nice and all that Mr. Leibowitz wants to ‘look at this issue,’ but I’m afraid that one of the things he can’t help but consider is the job security of his wife Ruth Marcus, a columnist for the Washington Post.

and

… if her paper’s revenues continue to decline, Marcus is exactly the type of employee who might find herself forced into accepting a buyout. So it’s difficult to believe that the findings Leibowitz helps shape will not be affected by the fact that his family’s current standard of living depends in part on his wife’s income working as a prominent columnist for one of America’s most storied newspapers.

Certainly Roston was right to point out a potential conflict of interest, and one can definitely argue that the FTC and Leibowitz should address this, but let’s look at this purely from Leibowitz’s perspective for a moment. If his findings come down against loosening antitrust regulations for newspapers, then obviously everything is fine since he would be going against his personal bias. However, if he writes a report in favor of antitrust exemptions, is there any possible way for people to believe that his bias didn’t influence his ruling? So how exactly has transparency helped him build trust in this case?

The way I see it, there are three groups of people to earn trust from: the people who agree with his report, the people who disagree with his report, and people who have no strong opinion on it. I don’t think he needs to do much to earn the trust of those who agree with the report, since no one wants to believe that the opinion they agree with was arrived at through shady means or motives. However, I just don’t see how the knowledge of Leibowitz’s personal ties to a journalist can help increase the trust from the other two groups. If anything, that knowledge has provided more reasons for them to distrust him and extra ammunition for discrediting his judgment, however fair and impartial he might’ve been in forming it.

It’s not hard to see how this applies to journalists. Once a reporter covering health care publicizes his stance on a health-care issue, that will influence how readers perceive his work. Rather than trust him more because they know that bias, people are more likely to assume his work is tinted and perhaps even tainted by it. The same goes for journalists covering any topic. Just as Leibowitz’s report can be dismissed as influenced by concerns for his personal financial situation, journalists’ report can be dismissed as influenced by anything from their political loyalties to their allegiances to a particular sports team. Just as it is humanly impossible for a journalist to have no opinion on anything, it is equally impossible for readers who disagree with a story to look past a disclosure that’s basically a giant neon sign flashing “BIAS” or “CONFLICT OF INTEREST”. Readers, like journalists, are only human.

Does that mean I favor pretending journalists are superhuman beings with no opinions? Of course not. I think transparency is a necessary part of journalism. Instead, I wrote this post to raise these points for consideration as we figure out how journalists can earn trust in the changing media landscape:

• If transparency is a trust-earning mechanism, whose trust are you actually earning? If it’s only the trust of those who already agree with you (with your transparency providing further affirmation of their beliefs), then you need to ask whether you actually had to work to earn that trust anyway, or if the stance of your story had already secured it.
• If saying “this is where I’m coming from” doesn’t convince those who disagree with your story that you reached your conclusions in a fair manner, then how effective a trust mechanism is transparency?

My stance is that transparency alone doesn’t earn enough trust. Leibowitz’s trust problem in this example isn’t one of transparency, but rather what that transparency revealed. The fairness of his judgment is being questioned not because he tried to conceal his personal ties (he didn’t), but rather because of the personal ties he didn’t try to hide. That’s a good illustration of the limitations of transparency as a trust-earning mechanism. To go beyond those limitations, I believe you still need (gasp!) objectivity.