A senior reporter with a leading local broadcaster recently told me that her organisation frequently undertook paid-for coverage. No big deal, she said. If an agency was willing to help fund the huge costs incurred in reportage about its activities, what was the harm?

I was appalled. I asked the reporter if she has ever heard of any such thing as objectivity in journalism. I got a sneer. Sure, she said. She was a thoroughly credible reporter. Surely, her objectivity was not about to be clouded by an organisation she had no personal relations with, merely because they paid her upfront. And my mouth was left agape.

There was no way of avoiding a shouting match. So, I deliberately started off on a melodramatic track. Is it okay to sleep with a source for a scoop, I asked. She hit the roof with disapproval. Well, I countered, is it okay to accept a flower? And she smiled. Why not, she said, who wouldn’t want a nice rose? How could one lousy rose compromise objectivity?

Sleeping with a source and accepting flowers amounts to the same thing, I said matter-of-factly. It compromises a reporter’s objectivity. So is the case when an acknowledged independent Press accepts payment for any coverage and presents it to viewers as news.

Journalists concur that objectivity is the hallmark of credible journalism. But the exact definition of the concept is not so easily a matter of consensus. One thing is for sure though: journalists frequently misunderstand objectivity to mean lack of bias.

Research reveals that when the concept of objectivity first evolved early in the Past century, it was not meant to imply that journalists were free of bias. Quite the contrary. The term began to appear around 1920, out of a growing concern that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for a consistent method of testing information, precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of journalistic work.

Method, the original ideal, is hardly remembered by reporters and editors today. In the rush for a scoop or to stay ahead of the pack, many reporters storm their beats armed only with good intentions and honest efforts. But in this craft, good intentions and honest efforts by Journalists are not enough. At the School of journalism, they taught me that a healthy degree of scepticism was a must in this business. "Get the story," my former director of admissions still signed off an email to me last week, implying that in my pursuit of stories I must not be content with cop talk and similar smooth-talking informants. Right, but the challenges of the practice suggest that even a healthy degree of cynicism is not enough.

Even the familiar refrain of "fairness" and "balance" can be thoroughly misleading. Fairness to whom? If I attribute three quotes to one party and three countering quotes to the opposing party, that is fair and balanced. But is that what journalistic objectivity is all about, a mathematical balance?

Method, rather than aim, is what draws the line between objectivity and everything else inferior in journalism. If we are to stay with the original concept, it is the method that is to be objective; not the journalist. The key is the discipline of the craft, not the self-professed "good intentions" of the journalist.

How do we actually achieve this? Ironically, most journalists and Media houses get this right by trial and error. Books abound on stuff like how to use public records; how to read documents or how to cover Press releases. But there is nothing likened to the standard rules of evidence, as is found in law; or an agreed-upon method of observation, as in scientific laboratories.

So reporters and editors are left on their own to devise techniques of verification, which sum up to objectivity.

The Oregonian, a US-based daily, for example, is said to employ a system called "prosecutorial editing". The process involves adjudicating a story, line by line, statement by statement. How do we know this? Why should the reader believe this? What is the assumption behind this sentence? If the story says that a certain event may raise questions in the people’s mind, who suggested that? The reporter? A source? A person on the street?

On the other hand, the San Jose Mercury News, the Californian publication otherwise known as the newspaper of Silicon Valley, developed an accuracy checklist. Is the lead (the first paragraph that we here call "Intro") sufficiently supported? Has someone double-checked? Is the background material required to understand the story? Are all the stakeholders in the story identified, and have representatives from the other side been given a chance to talk? Does the story pick sides or make value judgments? Will some people like this story more than they should? Is anything missing? Are all the quotes accurate and properly attributed, and do they capture what the person really meant?

This checklist is stuck up on computers all around the newsroom, lest anyone forgets.

Such do news people who care about their image pursue objectivity, by working out a consistent method of verification. But even if all this was in place, accepting any kind of favour from a source would bring any method plummeting down, and with it objectivity.

Kodi Barth teaches journalism at United States International University-Nairobi

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