View from nowhere

In journalism ethics and media ethics, the term "view from nowhere" describes a kind of false neutrality in reporting, whereby journalists disinform their audience by creating the impression that opposing parties to an issue have equal correctness and validity, even when the truth or falsehood of the parties' claims are mutually exclusive and verifiable by a diligent researcher. Media critic and professor of journalism Jay Rosen has been a notable promoter of the term and critic of the practice, and Rosen borrowed the term from philosopher Thomas Nagel's 1986 book The View From Nowhere.

The goal of objective and unbiased reporting ("just the facts"), often leaves subjective decisions about the meaning and value of facts in a news report up to the audience. But sometimes the facts of a particular story can have only one reasonable set of meanings. In such a case, a journalist must clearly define what facts are members of this set, and what beliefs are not a member of this set.

A journalist who does not help the audience evaluate which set of facts are most reasonable has taken the view from nowhere. This harms the audience by allowing them to draw conclusions from a story that includes untrue possibilities. It perpetuates confusion or generates bad conclusions where none would otherwise exist. Taking the view from nowhere can result from lazy or sloppy reporting just as easily as the active self-censorship of legitimate criticism. By broadcasting a view from nowhere to many people, the truth possibility set (with erroneous inclusions) is actively (re-)confirmed over and over again to the audience. Due to the one-to-many nature of broadcasting, this can lead large groups of normally reasonable people to make bad decisions.

Writer Elias Isquith argued, in an article for Salon, that "the view from nowhere not only leads to sloppy thinking but actually leaves the reader less informed than she would be had she simply read an unapologetically ideological source or even, in some cases, nothing at all".

A journalist who excludes relevant pieces of information from the set of true facts is telling a lie of omission; if the audience had all the missing data, it would reach a different conclusion. A journalist who strives for neutrality may also fail to exclude popular and/or widespread untrue claims from the set of facts about the story. A journalist may fail to confront their audience's biases and wrong conventional thinking because they forget the existence of the people on the other side of camera or printing press, and thus don't analyze their audience and address the audience's preconceptions.

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