My Business Is to Communicate Facts

Objectivity wasn't a philosophical awakening. It was a way to amortize telegraph costs.

The Associated Press was formed in 1846 by competing New York editors who realized telegraph bandwidth was too expensive to compete over. They pooled it. The cooperative structure forced an editorial consequence: copy had to be usable by Republican papers and Democratic papers, abolitionist papers and pro-slavery papers, all at once. Partisan flourish was stripped out because partisan flourish didn’t sell.

The “objectivity” that journalism schools would later teach as a moral standard was, at its origin, a billing problem. Wire-line minutes were expensive. The “inverted pyramid” was an insurance policy against an interrupted connection - put the most important fact at the top in case the line went dead.

AP veteran Lawrence Gobright described the doctrine cleanly: “My business is to communicate facts.” The night Lincoln was shot, Gobright transmitted 200 words of context before mentioning the President had been hit. The trust claim of the wire was that it had no narrator. The narrator had been priced out.

Sources: www.encyclopedia.com ↗www.ap.org ↗