On 27 January 2017, a week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Lewis Raven Wallace posted an
item on his blog titled Objectivity is dead, and I’m okay with it.
“Like a lot of people, I’ve been losing sleep over the news of the last week”, he
wrote. In his first press conference, White House spokesman Sean Spicer had described
Trump’s audience as “the largest ever to witness an inauguration, period”—an obvious lie. Soon
after, White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway explained on Talk of the Nation that Spicer
wasn’t lying, but merely using ‘alternative facts’. A politico-epistemological shift was under way
and the media had no idea how to navigate the new terrain. While it was common knowledge
that candidate Trump was an unrepentant liar, such defiantly false official statements were
something else entirely. Reading Wallace’s post today, his journalistic credo feels positively
quaint: “We can (and should) still tell the truth and check our facts”; “To call a politician on a lie
is our job”. What a difference four years make…
At the time, Wallace worked for Marketplace, a daily American Public Radio show about finance
and business, and was one of the mainstream media’s few out transgender reporters (“The only
out transgender person in every newsroom, every press conference, and nearly every
interview”). Marketplace asked him to remove the blog post, and when he refused, its vice
president flew from Los Angeles to New York to meet in a midtown Manhattan bistro. She told
Wallace he “didn’t want to do the kind of journalism they do there. Impartial journalism,” he
writes. Wallace was surprised because nobody had questioned the neutrality of his on-air work,
nor had Marketplace received any complaints about the blog post. “I didn’t really expect to be
fired over expressing what I thought was such a basic idea about privilege and objectivity.”
Marketplace offered him two weeks severance in exchange for signing an agreement not to
discuss the incident. He refused and instead channeled the material into a book, The View From
Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity (University of Chicago Press, 2019), a
podcast of the same name and several ancillary products.
Wallace’s project is notable as much for the questions it raises about objectivity in journalism,
as for the ecosystem through which he explores them. It is an example of how independent
documentary journalists can expand and augment their work, and deserves to be studied. It
started with a Kickstarter campaign, which raised $16,000. The first episodes of the podcast
appeared just before the pandemic hit, so Wallace responded to events in real time, adding
special episodes, like “Wash Your Hands, Know Your History—Revisiting AIDS in the Time of
Covid” (#12). In another episode, Wallace simply reads from the manuscript, audiobook style.
Most episodes feature the public-radio blend of reporting, explanation and interviews, opening
and closing with a theme song of snappy accordion riffs that would be at home on This
American Life. The show’s website offers heavily annotated transcripts, with links to sources
and resources. As episodes were released in late 2020, Wallace held live events, both in person
and virtual, and developed an online curriculum to accompany the book.
The View from Somewhere emerges at a time when the line between the written and spoken
word has blurred. Audiobook sales are growing at a faster rate than print books, with Audible
and Spotify competing for the market. Editing software like Descript collapses the distinction
between text and audio, allowing one to switch seamlessly between them; one can ‘cut tape’
using familiar copy-and-paste word-processing techniques, and swiftly transcribe audio files
with artificial intelligence. The creative marketplace is in flux as well, upending the traditional
scheme in which articles evolve into books, that then morph into movies or television shows.
Today, podcasts are fodder for television8 or books9, documentaries are accompanied by
podcasts, production companies shuffle projects between audio, print and video, regardless
of platform, and books become podcasts.
The View From Somewhere podcast is in the last category, and the podcast tracks the book’s
chapters fairly closely: both include sections about how the Black Lives Matter movement
expanded the media’s definition of what counts as ‘news’ to include police shootings of African
Americans; how ‘gay media’ altered the relationship between journalism and activism; how
conservatives learned to paint the mainstream media as ‘liberal’, and create doubt about
subjects (such as illegal voting or election fraud) where none exists. The engine that powers
both the book and podcast is the story of Wallace’s “subjective search for particular kinds of
people: rabble-rousers who resist, challenged, or shook up standards for news production in
the past.”
As Wallace notes at the beginning of the book, most professional journalism organisations have
dropped the word ‘objectivity’ from their ethical codes. Like the debate between objectivism
and relativism in philosophy, no intelligent person, if pressed, actually believes wholly in either
extreme. “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective”, said Time Inc. founder Henry Luce, “and
I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself”. All journalism is subjective and what matters is
how responsibly one deploys one’s subjectivity. Wallace argues that a crucial element of
responsible journalism is letting the audience know who you are—the better to judge how to
evaluate your claims. The book’s tone is more formal than the podcast’s, though it is far from
the solemn monograph that one expects from a university press. Audio is the most personal
medium, and lends itself to an extended tour through various modes of subjective expression.
Episode #4, ‘Gay Reporter Wants to be an Activist’, opens with Wallace interviewing his
mother; he identifies himself as “a 35-year-old who still calls their mom in a crisis”.
The podcast operates along two tracks. The first is the story of how the notion of ‘objective
journalism’ arose in 19th-century America, and the ways that its philosophical ghost haunts us
today. Conservatives are better at weaponising it than liberals. “Criticize other people for not
being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket”, says conservative
journalist Matt Labash. “Objectivity is a false ideal that upholds the status quo”, Wallace
writes, arguing that news judgement has less to do with objective criteria than with “who
controls the narrative, whose narratives matter, and how the appearance of mattering is
created in a society rife with entrenched inequality”. One critique that infuses the series is the
way objectivity was equated with white-dominated media, implicitly ghettoising journalism
produced by black and brown people as ‘activism’. Wallace flips the logic on its head,
suggesting that objectivity doesn’t merely support the status quo, it may keep us from the
truth. “What if objectivity isn’t just a wrong idea, but a harmful lie?”, he asks in episode #8
“What about the times when the opposite of detachment… connection and intimacy actually
get journalists closer to the truth?”.
The second track is a series of profiles of, and encounters with, Wallace’s journalism heroes.
The result is a kind of post-objective canon, a diverse community of journalists, with more
POCs, women and genders than usual. Some are well known, like the crusading Ida B. Wells,
who exposed the extent of lynching in America, and laid bare its roots in what would today be
labelled ‘white-supremacist thinking’. Others are less so, such as Marvel Cooke, an African
American investigative reporter and editor who organised America’s first Black newspaper
guild, and stood up to Senator Joseph McCarthy. And we learn about Ruben Salazar, one of the
first Latino journalists to have a byline in an anglo newspaper; he was killed during a protest,
when a police officer shot a tear gas projectile at Salazar’s head.
The podcast takes the form of a ‘quest’, with Wallace constructing a counter-narrative of what
good journalism might look like once we dispense with the debilitating concept of ‘objectivity’.
He makes shrewd use of interviews with people like Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowrey,
who explains how his experience as an African American allows him to see stories that his white
colleagues do not. For instance, having been racially profiled, he knows how to interview
people who have also experienced this form of injustice. “If you are someone who has never in
your life has ever had to think about it before, what is your framing and your perspective for
what questions you’re even asking?”, he explains in episode #2. Wallace also makes good use of
his producer, Romona Martinez, deferring to her when Latinx issues emerge.
Wallace subjects himself to the same scrutiny as others. When reporting the 2014 shooting
death of an African-American man shopping at a Walmart, he realised that he instinctively
refers to him as a ‘suspect’, thereby uncritically parroting the official narrative. During a 2016
Marketplace story about predatory home sales in Detroit, Wallace interviews Eddie Cave, a
disabled man living in an unheated house with no electricity. At one point, Eddie cries, and hugs
Wallace. “I had what radio people called good tape. But there I was, a white person extracting a
black person’s painful story. Again. For what?”, he asks in an episode titled, ‘The End of
Extractive Journalism’. Wallace vows to create useful journalism, rather than simply taking
people’s stories.
The series concludes with an episode on movement journalism,17 which Wallace associates less
with activism than the kind of immersive work on immigrant communities done by Tina
Vasquez, a reporter for Prism, a BIPOC-led non-profit news outlet. Wallace defines movement
journalism as “an ethical approach to truth-telling”, in which reporters “bring a power analysis
Although episode #14 includes a sentence–”On the next episode…navigating as a movement journalist
in the world of mainstream journalism” that indicates there may be more to come.
to our reporting, and focus on the process as much as the product”. That is, reporters don’t
merely parachute into a community, get a quote and leave. It is the opposite of extractive
journalism, which “treats facts like coal in a mine, using sources and places the way mining
companies use land—as a resource to dig into, and then leave behind”. On the podcast,
Vasquez describes her brand of journalism with the kind of earthy texture that can make audio
so pleasurable: “I mean, as a kid, I felt like it was a way to talk shit to adults and the way to hold
people accountable and make them uncomfortable. And I guess that’s still kind of what it is to
me”.