I don’t know precisely when the concept of objectivity came into American journalism.

I only know that by the time I showed up ready to play, it was already entrenched as the model. “Tell both sides of the story, fairly and without favor,” was pretty much what I got in journalism school and in my first newsroom.

Some scholars say journalistic objectivity came about in the 19th century. Perhaps it began then as journalism became more of a profession and less a calling for vagabonds and layabouts who could write but sought to avoid honest (read: difficult) work.

My own sense is that it came into its own in the 20th century. The papers I’ve worked for – both this one and The Kansas City Star – began in an era when any sizable American city had two or more newspapers. Often one was allied with the Republicans and the other with the Democrats.

Reporters and editors in that era knew and adhered to their newspaper’s point of view. Things got covered because of the newspaper’s “position,” or they got ignored for the same reason.

But the changing economics of newspapering, the evolving habits of readers in a nation moving from agrarian to industrial and post-industrial status, and increasing competition from other media, all led to consolidation. Cities that had two or three newspapers, like Tacoma, eventually had only one.

And when one newspaper found itself alone in a market, readers and advertisers alike demanded not an openly partisan view of the world but a middle-of-the-road account of events, mostly devoid of opinion, partisanship and naked agenda.

The exception, of course, is the editorial page. And even there, where opinion – even bias – is the whole point, fairness is expected and expressed by a balance of liberal and conservative columnists, and an even-handed treatment of those opposed to the paper’s stated position.

That worked pretty well for a while.

In postwar America, a middle-of-the-road journalism, one that was conservative (small “c”), that honored the status quo and middle-class values (sort of a Frank Capra view of America), seemed to be acceptable to readers and to be the right tool for the job at hand.

But that simplistic sort of objectivity began to show some cracks as the civil rights movement, assassinations of presidents and political leaders, urban riots, the Vietnam War and Watergate all tested us as citizens and as a nation.

Objectivity – as it was taught – often boiled down to telling both sides of a story (as if two were the limit). What that frequently produced was reporting two views that were polls apart, without challenging either or trying to tell a central truth, even if one was obvious.

In that era, objectivity produced journalism that reported the Pentagon data on the number of U.S. killed vs. the number of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army killed. And stopped there. The central truth that we were winning battles and losing the war never broke through.

That view of objectivity also produced subtle and unintended blind spots among journalists.

It produced a singular focus on factual accuracy. “Just the facts, ma’am,” was a saying that reporters borrowed from “Dragnet,” the TV melodrama.

It was a way of saying we’re not interested in nuance.

You’d hear journalists defending a story whose substance was clearly wrong by challenging a critic to cite one factual error.

That ignores the times when all the numbers can be right, but they’re the wrong numbers.

I think in that era we also were in denial about journalism’s effect on events, and we denied that journalism had certain interests (open government, the First Amendment) about which, in my view, we shouldn’t be objective or neutral.

I believe journalism must take responsibility for both.

What we choose to cover (or ignore) influences events. How we play a story (on the front page or deep inside the paper) influences events.

We needed to own up to that. And we have a responsibility to share with readers how and why we make particular coverage decisions.

We also need to tell readers the areas where we have a stated bias.

At The News Tribune we make no apology for seeing value in open government or the First Amendment. But we also have an obligation to report the views of people who disagree.

The philosophical impossibility of pure objectivity, and the simplistic and faulty ways it was practiced, led many journalists to explore better standards of journalism that supported truth-telling in ways that were fair and transparent.

One of the best explorations of this issue was in a book called “News Values,” by Jack Fuller, former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and president of Tribune Publishing Co.

Fuller talks about journalistic truth, and about the strengths and limitations of various models of getting there – accuracy, objectivity, authority, the adversarial approach and neutrality.

But his strongest argument, in my view, is for a combination he calls “intellectual honesty and the Golden Rule.”

“Open-mindedness, impartiality, the duty to be candid about one’s reasoning and about what one knows and does not know, the responsibility to put as forcefully as possible the positions of those with whom one disagrees,” Fuller muses. “These virtues all come together in the concept of intellectual honesty, which links the truth discipline in journalism with the highest standards in scientific and academic debate. It is as good a statement of aspiration as any I can think of for journalists.”

He continues: “Intellectual honesty means that in presenting a news report a journalist may draw certain conclusions and make certain predictions about the consequences of a particular event, but it also imposes a duty to do justice to the areas of legitimate debate.

“This is what separates news from polemical writing. The former must attempt to represent a matter of public concern in its fullness. A polemic aims to persuade the audience that one view of the matter is undoubtedly correct.”

He adds the Golden Rule – to treat others the way we would want to be treated – this way: “In reporting a matter of legitimate debate (How big should the Pentagon budget be? Did Alderman X take a bribe?), the journalist will surely reach some conclusions. And, with some constraints … he should feel free to share his conclusions with his readers.

“But in doing so, the Golden Rule suggests that the reporter must try to put the case against his conclusions as forcefully as he would want an opponent to put the reporter’s own arguments.”

That’s as good a standard for basic news reporting as I know.

I would add a couple of things: (1) that the journalism be transparent enough that readers should be able to apply the same tests to the issue and come up with the same result and (2) that journalists be willing to discuss and defend their methods with readers who challenge them.

Intellectual honesty in this very sense is what we increasingly ask in the TNT newsroom.

We’re not just looking for two sides of a story. We’re looking for all sides.

And we see our job as telling every side as well as the best advocate for each could tell it. If we get to a truth, we should say so and lay out all the evidence, including the very best contrary evidence.

We can’t be perfect. But we can be honest and open about our reporting, giving readers all the facts and context and interpretation available, and letting them decide whether we’ve done our jobs well and gotten at the truth.

David Zeeck is The News Tribune’s executive editor and senior vice president for news, as well as a member of the editorial board.