Personal essay: The pitfalls of chasing objectivity

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When I worked for my college newspaper, I wanted to write a story about a South Asian student group successfully adding protections against caste-based discrimination to our college’s nondiscrimination policy. Editors at the paper initially said I would be unable to write the story because I had been part of the student group, which made me have an inherent bias. 

The group was a racial affinity mentorship group, and I didn’t choose my race. After some discussion, I was allowed to write the article, but the incident made me rethink my place in journalism. I wondered if it was a viable field for me to pursue if I couldn’t report on the topics that mattered to me.

This is a struggle I continue to feel to this day. 

Objectivity and impartiality is considered one of the bedrocks of journalism. Some of the most prominent legacy media outlets such as The Associated Press, The New York Times, NPR, and Reuters have ethics codes that state that their journalists do not express political opinions. 

But who determines what is political? For some of us, our identities are inherently politicized due to history and circumstances beyond our control. Objectivity is a controversial topic, and its pursuit can often disadvantage journalists of minority backgrounds. 

A growing number of journalists are challenging the notion of objectivity. In The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, Lewis Raven Wallace argues that objectivity has historically been used to silence marginalized writers. 

At Central Desi, my fellow reporters have felt this struggle. Selena Patel, a South Asian journalism student from New York University, said she feels the expectations of objectivity disproportionately affects journalists from minority backgrounds when reporting on issues like race, gender or sexuality. 

“There’s only so many ways you can stay neutral,” she said about reporting on controversial topics that relate to her identity. “To me this is not my opinion, this is my life.” 

Breaking stereotype

I initially went into journalism because, like many other journalists of minority backgrounds, I grew exhausted of redundant, one-dimensional, dehumanizing media depictions of my Muslim and South Asian communities. 

Growing up, we always had the news playing on the television. I remember seeing a constant barrage of Muslims being depicted as terrorists. The justification for U.S. military action in Muslim countries was that oppressed Muslim women were in need of liberation from violent Muslim men. 

That logic was reinforced through the media, but it was so far removed from the gender dynamics in my own community. In my household, my mother was loud, outspoken and the disciplinarian of my parents. In contrast, my dad was introverted, soft-spoken and followed my mother in the decision making. 

I witnessed the way harmful media depictions of my community led to real-life implications. In 2015 while I was in high school, hundreds of armed anti-Muslim protestors demonstrated outside of one of our Phoenix mosques. I remember feeling afraid as our community was sending an overt signal that we were not welcome. 

Around that same time, I took a class on global terrorism in high school where a guest speaker told us that mosques in Phoenix were breeding grounds for terrorists. 

During speech-and-debate practice, one of my classmates argued that the U.S. shouldn’t withdraw from Afghanistan because Afghan people committed honor killings, were “uncivilized” and were incapable of governing themselves without Western assistance. Witnessing all of this was dehumanizing, but it was not surprising, as my peers were repeating narratives about Muslims that were constantly reinforced in the media. 

These experiences pushed me towards pursuing a career in journalism. I wanted to contribute to the media, providing complex, contextualized and multi-dimensional depictions of my community while reporting on issues pertinent to my community. 

Changing the narrative

In college, I interviewed Muslim students and community leaders for research about how knowledge of state sponsored surveillance impacted Muslim American political expression. 

During grad school, I wanted to continue my research on surveillance in the Muslim community with a master’s project on a government-funded program that had been criticized for surveilling Muslims. My advisor on my master’s project told me that “no one would care” about the topic, and I would have to change the topic if I couldn’t find someone who had been unfairly incarcerated by the program.  

I understood that my advisor wanted me to find real-life implications of the surveillance, but her comments made me feel as if I had to cater my writing to a white audience and I could only write about my community when they faced egregious injustices.

In another instance, while producing a podcast on refugees resettling in the U.S., a family of Afghan refugees opened up to me after I told them I was also Muslim. The wife started crying, saying she missed her life in Afghanistan and that in the U.S. they were unable to attend the mosque or buy halal food. My editor encouraged me to use the audio, saying it had an emotional impact. 

My Muslim identity felt as if it is something that I am expected to take on and off depending on how well it works with the story I’m telling and based on how a white audience will perceive it. 

Ifrah Akhtar, a freelance journalist and Central Desi fellow, said she often feels like the “token Desi Muslim person” in the newsroom. She said when publications do feature a South Asian story, they’re usually performative cultural pieces lacking nuance about South Asian communities. 

Ongoing challenges

A recent example of newsrooms relying on journalists of diverse backgrounds only when it’s convenient was MSNBC quietly removing three Muslim broadcasters from the anchor’s chair after Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7. 

One of those journalists, Mehdi Hasan, had a weekly show that was canceled shortly after that. That decision drew strong criticism. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D.-Minn. said on X that “it is deeply troubling” that MSNBC was canceling his show “amid a rampant rise of anti-Muslim bigotry and suppression of Muslim voices.” Rep. Ro Khanna, D.-Calif., criticized MSNBC for canceling Hasan’s show without explanation during a time when the broadcaster was vocal for human rights in Gaza. 

In a time of intense political debate in the U.S. about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the removal of Muslim journalists signifies how journalists of color are given a platform only when it’s politically expedient. 

Reporters from The Los Angeles Times who signed a letter in November condemning Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza were suspended from covering the war in Gaza for three months. 

I could not find similar instances of journalists being removed from their jobs or not allowed to cover the Israel-Palestine conflict for supporting Israel. This indicates how “objectivity” is only invoked when reporters challenge the status quo or the dominant narrative. 

“It’s not an even playing field when it comes to what people of color can talk about even though newsrooms want diversity. They don’t necessarily want to hear the truth of what our experience is,” a 25-year-old South Asian associate producer at a California-based podcast company told me, asking me to withhold her name for privacy.  

The associate producer had written a piece about caste discrimination in America for a class in journalism school, but decided not to publish the piece outside of her class website in fear of the backlash her family might receive. She said that journalists who are directly impacted by an issue can face greater negative consequences for reporting on that topic. 

“90% of Indian immigrants are upper caste,” she said. “Lower caste people speaking up is an inherently really dangerous and scary thing to do.”

Disclosing our humanity

Akhtar said that the journalism she appreciates the most is where journalists disclose their relationship to their story and why they decided to pursue the story. “The journalism community as a whole does a disservice to what it means to be human because they want us to take that out of some things we write,” she said. 

The debate around objectivity and identity has been evolving, especially after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 that sparked national conversations about racial justice and diversity in workplaces. In 2022, a survey by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism found that new efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion have positively affected the journalism industry, 

Journalism organizations take great efforts to maintain objectivity. But journalists are humans who all have a set of beliefs and biases. By recognizing our unique backgrounds, identities and opinions, we might be better equipped to interrogate how those factors impact our reporting and be more transparent with our readers. 

I have a different outlook on journalism than when I first began writing. At times, I have felt discouraged by the response I’ve gotten when writing about issues that directly impact me. I’m more intentional about when and how I write about those issues, but I still strive to do so.

Sofia Ahmed is a reporting fellow for Central Desi.

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