"Journalistic Objectivity" Has Always Had a Price Tag
The AP fired Emily Wilder, but is partnering with a sports betting website. How does that make any sense?
Last week, the Associated Press made headlines for firing Emily Wilder, a young journalist who had the gall to support the human rights of Palestinians in college. In a meandering statement justifying Wilder’s ousting, the AP implied she had “jeopardize[d] our journalism or the journalists who are covering the story.”
Then, on Tuesday, the AP made another eye-popping announcement: it would partner with sports betting website FanDuel to exclusively cite its odds in sports articles. “It makes sense to work with one of the largest, reputable sportsbooks in the United States to provide a consistent, credible reference point for AP and its customers,” AP products director Barry Bedlan said, according to Variety. The AP is set to bring in an undisclosed sum of money from the deal, Variety reported.
Sports betting is a billion-dollar industry, as the AP itself has been eager to report on in the past. Now that the AP has a financial staker in the industry’s success, a reader could—in good faith—question the organization's incentive to report news affecting the industry.
Wilder, on the other hand, did not report on the Middle East. She was a Southwest correspondent, and a quick search of the AP’s website shows she did not write about Israel or Palestine during her short tenure at the newswire.
This begs the question: why does the AP consider FanDuel an objective reference point for its readers, but not a journalist? Simple. The former brings them money. The latter doesn’t—and, with the right-wing outrage economy stoked against Wilder by the likes of Sen. Tom Cotton and Ben Shapiro, had the potential to cost them cash. Journalism has always taken the former more seriously than the latter, as a matter of survival—the industry is on a financial back foot, after all. Yet this standard, justified as a necessity in the search for fearless truth-telling and objectivity, is itself on its face biased.
Ben Smith, the august New York Times media critic and former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, described the backlash over Wilder’s firing as “not so much about abandoning the idea of neutrality, as shifting where that neutral position is.” Smith is half right—objectivity has in of itself never been a set point, but a norm agreed upon by those in power. And, when Smith was in power at BuzzFeed, his site deleted articles at the behest of advertisers.
In this economy, however, no one is innocent. Gawker, which broke the BuzzFeed story, itself censored its own articles at the behest of corporate. The New York Times, Smith’s current employer, has not one, not two, but THREE regular columnists with undisclosed lobbying side gigs. The Washington Post, the other big newspaper of record in the U.S., is owned by the richest man in the world and has been accused of going soft on his ever-hegemonic Amazon.
You get the point. The for-profit model of journalism introduces a tension for reporters in readers: how can you be trusted to be fair and objective toward the power centers who underwrite your writing? Journalism’s gatekeepers—editors and management—have taken an individualistic approach to combating said bias, pruning individual reporters such as Wilder, or Chris Hedges before her.
Yet this hasn’t staved off cries (typically from the right) about journalism being a corrupt industry. They’re also right. If journalism wants to be truly objective, it needs to reexamine its financial relationship with those in power—and start taking that more seriously than the opinions of individual reporters. Why worry about “objectivity” when you clearly didn’t care about appearances when it was making you money?