The end of objectivity and neutrality in civic and environmental journalism

Abstract

This article stems from a bibliographic study about American civic journalism and from an exploratory research, using content and documental analysis of data collected by interview, questionnaire and copies of neighborhood and small town newspapers that have community characteristics, resulting in an comparative analysis of the two types of journalistic practice during the 1990s and the first five years of the 21st century. This kind of journalism, marked by the participation of the community, was also called communitary journalism, engaged journalism, popular journalism and public journalism. All of them have in common the centralizing of the profession´s practical objectives on encouraging efforts to advance citizenship, improving public debate, reviewing public life and contributing to the improvement of democracy. Based on this study, a proposal arose regarding some themes that are present in the daily press, especially the environment theme, calling for the end of the practical journalism that advocates a “sham neutrality, impartiality and objectivity”.