“The View from the Top”: Elite Metajournalistic Responses to Normative Critiques of American Journalism

Abstract

Recent debates about journalism’s abiding values have often centered the role journalistic objectivity has played in sustaining various inequities in American society. Amid these challenges, newsroom leaders, executives, and owners have spoken publicly about a need to defend the profession’s traditions, especially a commitment to objectivity and independence. Through a textual analysis of arguments and statements from top editors and publishers defending values like objectivity and independence, this study considers how a form of metajournalistic discourse has emerged from journalism’s managerial class that rhetorically and ideologically moderates calls for cultural change from both inside and outside the profession. As elite figures define threats to the field—externally from rising authoritarianism and inwardly from a generation questioning traditional values—they proffer a return to independence, setting boundaries around critiques calling for ethical and normative change, but also preserving an elite insularity that has long been part of journalism’s professional culture.

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