I never expected to become a regular writer for The Daily. In fact, at many points in my time at Northwestern, I might’ve told you I was sworn against it. The barriers to entry were too high, I told myself. I didn’t know the right people or have the right skills.
For two quarters of my freshman year, I set a goal to complete my developing staffer training. I wanted to say that I was certified as a reporter for the paper, but in reality, I had no idea what I wanted to report on, whether I had any interest in journalism beyond my major, or if I possessed the basic journalistic instincts to cover a football game (which shouldn’t have been a daunting task considering my nearly ten years of on-field experience as a player).
All that to say, I still haven’t completed my training. But alas, here I am.
My personal notions of what journalism is and what it is becoming differ from conventional definitions that have been in use since the inception of the Medill School of Journalism. Contrary to these notions, journalism is not an objective enterprise. It’s not a learned science where emotions are secondary to the facts transcribed.
Journalism, its science and its practitioners comprise a collective human endeavor — a synthesis of facts drawn from necessary perspectives to build consensus on truths, yes, but more importantly, to inspire subjective conclusions to satisfy a broader goal of saturating the public arena with discourse. That’s why I love opinion pieces: the final drafts of journalistic undertakings.
In the wake of accusations of “fake news” and confusion surrounding how to cover the spectacle that is politics today, a conflation of facts, truth and journalism emerged. The practice of journalism indeed exists to communicate truths and to fact-check authority figures. But objective truth and journalism are not and fundamentally cannot be the same thing.
To say or report that President Donald Trump issued pardons to nearly 1,500 individuals convicted of crimes for events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 is a fact, but it is not journalism.
To say that Elon Musk, with a wealth that consists of X (formerly known as Twitter), Tesla and valuable government contracts, has scored coveted office space in the West Wing in physical proximity to the president are facts, but not journalism.
But to ask “why,” to dig deeper and to suggest how readers might interpret these facts to come to their own conclusions — about democracy, our fight to progress as a society and our collective human experience — that is journalism throughout history and indeed, in the 21st century.
This is not to say that the principled approach of objective reporting is becoming obsolete. Far from it. The nature of the time we are living in commands a certain high standard of truth-telling, rigorous sourcing and innovative storytelling for our diminishing attention spans.
But as we enter a time of deep uncertainty for those interested in a free press, instead of posing the hypothetical question a child asks of their parent or grandparent, “What did you do?” to politicians and government officials on policy matters, the question instead should be directed at journalists.
What did you do, when everything was on the line? To tell the right stories? To write a first draft of history that needs little revision?
What did you do to preserve our republic?
I do not believe AI threatens to replace journalists. There are simply too many aspects of journalism that must be done on the fly, something today’s large language models cannot compute.
But as these models become poised to take over the monotonous aspects of the journalist profession, from backgrounding to transcription to reporting, the industry must be willing to shift its focus.
It is only objective to shift to a certain subjectivity — biased toward ourselves, the success of the human race in its fight against conflict and climate change and the preservation of democracy at home and abroad.
Biased toward the whole story, not part. Because a false sense of objectivity, of “sanewashing,” of apathy in the face of oppression, will be our undoing.
I love opinion writing because it gets at the heart of the journalist’s purpose. To expose us to the truth, yes, but also, to tell a holistic story of our time and our impact on one another. Because beyond the automated tasks of reporting there exists the most critical aspect of meaningful journalism: its innate and inalienable humanity.
For these reasons, I am thrilled to launch my weekly opinion column “Fourth Wall,” where I promise you complete authenticity. I hope you’ll read along.
Aidan Klineman is a Medill sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.