ESCHEW EDITORIALIZING.

That used to be the responsibility of the reporter.

How a reporter feels about that information is not relevant to the news story. This is also important for communicators who write news stories or news releases about their organizations to share with news media. They should avoid being overly promotional in their writing.

To avoid editorializing, a writer should present only facts and limit or eliminate most adjectives, except in direct quotes. For example, instead of writing, “He was sad,” describe what the person did that made you think he was sad. Instead of writing, “He was sad,” you could write, “He placed his head in his hands and wept.” Present what you see and hear; let the reader make the connection that the person was sad. How do you know something is “interesting,” “impressive,” “tragic,” or “avoidable”? That is your opinion. Just present the facts. Leave the value judgment to your readers. Journalists often go by the adage, “Show, don’t tell.”

Editorializing can be avoided by attributing any information that is not a fact or is not common knowledge.

Academic writing used to respect similar conventions.

Academic writing aims to convey information in an impartial way. The goal is to base arguments on the evidence under consideration, not the author’s preconceptions. All claims should be supported with relevant evidence, not just asserted.

To avoid bias, it’s important to represent the work of other researchers and the results of your own research fairly and accurately.

It might be that achieving perfection is impossible, but in pursuing it the writer might achieve excellence.

These days, though, does the impossibility mean the writer might not even bother?

Consider this surrender with a shrug.  "I will prove to you in two sentences that objectivity is impossible."  What are Zeeshan Aleem's two sentences?

(1) A young man accused of robbing a convenience store was lethally wounded after a struggle with a police officer in Ferguson on Saturday.

(2) A white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teen in Ferguson on Saturday.

These ledes are not real (nor are they particularly elegant). But both sentences could be used to accurately describe the same event: the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

In the first sentence, the picture that emerges is of a criminal who lost his life after a fight with a police officer. In the second sentence, the picture that emerges is of a police officer who murdered a boy, quite possibly because he is a minority.

There might be better ways to frame the first lede, such as "A young man who allegedly robbed a convenience store subsequently died after a struggle with a Ferguson police officer," which replaces the passive constructions Mr Aleem calls attention to "dilute the responsibility," in his essay of the Ferguson cop, although it might dilute the responsibility of the shopkeeper.  It might be futile to write more carefully, because no matter how careful the writer is, the writer's point of view is still there.

My point is that even factual accounts that avoid what’s commonly perceived as openly opinionated or inflammatory language can — and will — differ and showcase different worldviews. The facts cannot save you, because raw facts are only a portion of the expression of truth. Facts must be defined, described, arranged, linked to one another, and contextualized in order to be useful for the world. That process involves choices and interpretation, and the answers to which choices are best come not from the world “as it is” or “the data” but instead from the realm of values and ideas. Those values and ideas are not just held by the individual interpreter but also shaped by the institutions and cultures they’re embedded in.

Whether or not journalists admit it or realize it, when they’re writing a story they’re asking themselves questions such as: Is this event worth chronicling? What’s most important here? Who should I trust? Who should I be skeptical of? What history is most important to highlight? What really caused this event? What’s fair and unfair about this situation? Is this new or a manifestation of a broader trend? Who should I talk to about what this means? Who should I quote in the article? Which perspectives should be ignored? What solutions should be hinted at or discussed, if any?

That's fair enough, but reporting and conducting sociological studies are distinct modes of inquiry with distinct discourse practices.  We might do better to have more reporting that respects that initial advice, as it is relatively easy to do Mr Aleem's contrast with different examples.

(1) Poll Shows Most Americans Still Realize Gender Is A Biological Fact.

(2)Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP, poll shows.

All that choice and interpretation and contextualization leads Freddie deBoer to despair.  "The way we talk about just about everything is broken. Today, the brokenness that saps my strength lies in this utter inability to see outside of anything but a pure binary of good and bad."

You'd think the people who run the institutions allegedly of higher education would reject that sort of binary.  Then comes Vanderbilt education professor (predictably?) Brian L. Heuser in defense of that pure binary.

Vanderbilt’s chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, has argued that the modern university should steer clear of government entanglements, because of the “pervasive threat [that] lies in academic leaders taking political positions or making politicized statements while speaking on behalf of their universities.” His expanded rationale follows: “University leaders can better serve students and faculty by maintaining a stance of principled neutrality—by reserving comment on political matters and leaving space for varied ideas and opinions to flourish on campus and for respectful, if passionate, discourse to go where it will.” In the simplest terms, such a position is both morally inconsistent with our university’s shared values and strategically dangerous for Vanderbilt’s future.

Why?

Despite the chancellor’s insistence that “staying neutral requires courage,” many of our university stakeholders are experiencing significant fear as Nashville’s social conditions have deteriorated for women and members of our LGBTQI, Jewish, Black and immigrant communities. In this context, such neutrality is better understood as a toxic form of indifference to the lived realities of our citizens. We have also experienced horrific gun violence arriving on our doorstep, and our undergraduate students have taken the lead in defending our community’s safety. In this context, such neutrality is better understood as a brutal fear of governmental intrusion into our affairs.

Due in large part to our exceptional stock of human capital and economic impact, universities can be powerful—even profound—actors in the public discourse. But adeptly leveraging this potential requires transformational leadership, political acumen and a steadfast commitment to prioritizing the common good. Universities can—and often do—create significant social cohesion by using their knowledge capital to shape the public’s understanding of and commitment to inclusive causes. But this potential must also be activated by administrators who believe that it is worth their time and effort to engage with their larger communities on difficult issues.

That Vanderbilt, and universities more generally, might have erred over the past thirty or forty years on the side of "transformational leadership" hostile to "the lived realities" of citizens, including students, who are not the preferred congregants of the Church of Intersectionality, and that the received concept of "the common good" isn't so good for many of the sinners.

Never mind that, the Faithful must be Protected.

Practically speaking, it is implausible to seek to recruit the best academic talent in the world while one’s university is silent on matters of great importance to those same humans whom we seek to attract. Diverse professors and students are embodied and connected to families that desire them to move to cities with high qualities of life, which includes the freedom to be who they are and flourish according to their own cultural needs and desires within their larger social contexts. The increasing political threats against members of our community based on their sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity and national origin is not something our university can continue to remain distanced from if our leadership has any hope for us to retain our reputational legitimacy. As universities have become highly adept at recruiting diverse talent for their own competitive purposes, they have also assumed the responsibility to faithfully advocate for these colleagues to all constituents, including governments.

Moreover, as colleges and universities have increasingly sought to leverage their diversity, equity and inclusion affinity groups for fundraising campaigns, they have concomitantly sought to align their stated missions more closely with marginalized identities and their respective priorities. Choosing to remain publicly silent on political matters of importance to these alumni is to risk alienating them at the exact time when their role in development endeavors has never been more important to institutional success. It is also ethically dubious to seek increased funding from the same individuals you refuse to publicly defend.

Let me offer a dissenting perspective from Wenyan Wu.

Apparently, the [Academic Senate for California Community Colleges] thinks that a refusal to endorse the political edict of DEI isn’t protected by academic freedom. Rather, it can be construed as a weaponization of academic freedom to “create educational or work environments hostile to protected classes or DEIA.” By the same token, what would happen to a professor who insists on teaching American history as an upward trajectory of hope and progress instead of a struggle-centered journey of colonialism? He may very well be subject to regulatory scrutiny for abusing academic freedom to harm marginalized people and undermine the cause of DEIA and anti-racism.

The fact that a reputable higher education institution is seriously considering such dubious proposals should be cause for concern. It further exposes the incompatibility between upholding free speech and advancing DEI. The latter forcibly requires unprincipled compromises on the former because traditionally protected, contrarian speech that does not amount to incitement of violence, defamation, obscenity, or threats is now offensive and “harmful” enough to be worthy of cancellation.

Professor Heuser has not pushed his argument that far.  It's possible, though, for True Believers in the strong form of "speech is violence" to suggest that traditional approaches to composition or history are insufficiently aligned with "marginalized identities and their respective priorities."  That will not end well.

This politicization of higher education—to carefully curate “safe” and “inclusive” spaces so that so-called marginalized groups are not offended—is harmful for our students. As parents, we are constantly reminded that we cannot take the world out of our children even if we try to take them out from the world (and its many corrupt influences). Likewise, shielding an entire generation from unpopular opinions and intellectual discourse for the sake of DEI and anti-racism will not prepare them for the real world.

What's that line about the person who only understands his own side of an argument doesn't understand it?