Abstract

Objectivity is a key concept in journalism studies, yet a controversial one. Scholars disagree on what it precisely implies and on how strictly journalists should stick to it. I claim that adopting an argumentative perspective enables to see how journalists deal with objectivity in everyday work. In fact, the objectivity requirement plays the role of endoxical premise in argumentative reasoning that takes place during newsroom decision-making. In the present paper, this is shown by analyzing argumentative discussions in two television newsrooms of the Swiss public service broadcaster. The case studies shed light on what objectivity means for these two newsrooms, as well as on how the goal of being objective intermingles with that of telling a story. Methodologically, argumentation is reconstructed employing Pragma-Dialectics, while endoxical premises and inferential patterns supporting standpoints are traced out applying the Argumentum Model of Topics. The examples are taken from a corpus collected during the Swiss National Science Foundation project “Idée suisse”.