When Carr Van Anda joined The New York Times as its managing editor on February 14, 1904⁠, the temperature inside the office dropped a few degrees—or so it felt.

Van Anda, age 39, was a chilly newsroom presence, a formal man who wore rimless glasses and a stickpin through his starched collars. Times reporters lived in fear of his chastening glare. They called it the “death ray.”

The most famous stories about “V.A.,” as he was known around the office, came a little later on—the time he corrected an equation of Albert Einstein’s, the time his identification of an ancient forgery forced the British Museum to revise its official biography of King Tutankhamen. But his savantlike intelligence was picked up on almost immediately by his newsroom colleagues. “He scents buncombe and fraud miles away,” one of them later wrote. He had the sort of skeptical mind that reflexively questioned the assumption that the Titanic was unsinkable, and the news sense to spring into action the moment its radio went silent⁠—resulting in a Times scoop for the ages.

[From the November 1919 issue: British and American newspapers]

Radio and television did not exist yet; the only way to get the daily news was by reading a newspaper, and the manner in which newspapers went about collecting and presenting the news was changing rapidly. The turn-of-the-century New York Times was exactly the right place for Van Anda to have landed. Though traditional in some ways, the paper was also at the vanguard of a movement to rationalize and expand news coverage. Since acquiring the Times in 1896, the publisher Adolph Ochs had ignored the prevailing wisdom that New York City’s brash, crusading “yellow journals” were the trade’s future. Whereas those papers outraged, amused, and promised to make big things happen, Ochs vowed simply to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor,” and to let the Times serve as “a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”

The Times was not an exciting read. But Ochs treated its reputation for dullness as an asset, not a liability. He downplayed its editorials, expanded anything having to do with news, financial news in particular. He invested in the paper’s legal coverage and began listing the day’s fires and real-estate deals. Rival papers such as The Sun and the Tribune sniped that the Times had somehow managed to become even more sleep-inducing. By the time they realized that the Ochs strategy was working, he’d surged ahead of them. Even the mighty Joseph Pulitzer felt compelled to bring his New York World around.

What Ochs had realized was that his rivals had undervalued the demand for timely, comprehensive, and trustworthy information. He’d correctly judged that readers, or at least “quality” readers (as they were called), were fed up with sensationalism.

His tidy slogan for the Times—“All the news that’s fit to print”—made it clear what he was offering. His rapid turnaround of the Times is one of the great success stories in the history of journalism.

The air of authoritative impartiality with which Ochs and Van Anda imbued the Times is now under assault from both ends of the political spectrum. The right accuses the so-called mainstream media of abandoning neutrality, while the progressive left argues that it should be abandoned. No one is truly unbiased, the left notes, and so journalists might as well declare where they stand. “Transparency is the new objectivity,” this argument goes. Some advocates even profess to believe that ditching forced postures of impartiality will help restore trust in media, rather than erode it further.

[Imani Perry: Why I reject the gospel of objectivity]

But the case for more bias in reporting is very dodgy, and one suspects that it has gained traction mostly because what passes for journalistic evenhandedness these days is a pale imitation of the version embraced by idealists such as Ochs and Van Anda.

In today’s opinion-driven news environment, the other side of the story is often presented more out of a sense of obligation than true curiosity. Some outlets have given counternarratives more consideration than they deserve. Being dismayed by all the false equivalences and foregone conclusions makes sense, but giving up on such an important guiding principle after experiencing the cheapened version of it is like renouncing all forms of air travel after flying easyJet.

It’s worth remembering that, back when Ochs and Van Anda began working together, the model of objective journalism that is now derided as the “view from nowhere” was not the default. Throughout the 19th century, moderation and impartiality were virtually unknown in popular media. Many newspapers didn’t just lean one way or the other politically—they answered directly to party bosses. Standards of accuracy were lower. “Buncombe and fraud” were facts of life.

Pulitzer revolutionized the field in the 1880s by modeling a new and more democratic type of newspaper, one that achieved important social change at the cost of dizzying sensationalism. Whereas other papers had reported on murders, melodramas, and sex scandals, Pulitzer (and his eventual rival, William Randolph Hearst) pumped up these trivialities as front-page news. This unseemly aspect of “yellow journalism” lives on, especially on cable news and social media, but it has been less influential than many turn-of-the-century critics feared. For this we can thank Ochs and Van Anda.

The conservative demeanors of both men could be misleading. Both were enthralled by the age of velocity into which America was zooming. While the respected Tribune decried the spread of “telephone mania⁠,” with its “constant ‘helloing’” and “senseless chatter,” the Times—with some notable exceptions—broadly embraced technological and scientific progress, far more than it had before. Van Anda shared his boss’s enthusiasm for automobiles, aviation, and polar exploring, and especially for anything—like Marconi wireless—that could speed up the gathering and presentation of the news.

Van Anda, in the words of one admirer, believed “that managing a paper could be done as scientifically and as intelligently as running a laboratory,” and his omnivorous intellect matched the encyclopedic tendencies of the Times. So did his predilection for facts and figures, and his utter indifference to stylish writing.

The Times newsroom under him was at the forefront of a fundamental evolution in the way that editors and reporters collaborated. Reporters had traditionally been tasked with interpreting the news they gathered, even at the risk of misjudgment. But as daily metropolitan newspapers evolved into more complicated operations, reporters were asked to change the way they worked. As the communications historians Kathy Roberts Forde and Katherine A. Foss have put it, they adopted “an ideology of naive empiricism.”

News editors like Van Anda demanded just the facts. They took it upon themselves to determine what those facts meant, and they headlined, ordered, amplified, and excised the reporter’s work accordingly. The editor’s loftier perspective and superior training qualified him for this responsibility, the thinking went, and the modern reader preferred the editor’s discreet framing to the blatantly opinionated journalism of years past.

Van Anda had plenty of strongly held opinions—he despised Woodrow Wilson, for example. But some combination of scientific thinking, professional pride, and institutional pressure enabled him to set these beliefs aside. “It was most extraordinary,” Ochs later recalled, “that feeling as intensely as he did towards many men and measures, there never was the slightest indication of his personal point of view in his presentation of the news concerning them … I often marveled [at] how he avoided having it unconsciously shown.”

None of this is to say that the early-20th-century Times lacked a point of view. As leftist critics of the era were quick to note, its orientation was firmly pro-establishment and pro–Wall Street, and it defaulted to upholding the status quo. The Times under Ochs looked down at the “muckraking” of Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, and had none of the investigative zeal that it would develop later. And Ochs shut women out of the newsroom, despite the fact that Pulitzer and others had made stars of female correspondents such as Nellie Bly.

Prejudices such as these were considered less important than they are today. But just because the quiet revolution of impersonal, facts-based journalism didn’t achieve everything all at once doesn’t mean that it should be casually dispensed with.

Another important thing happened during this first decade of the Ochs–Van Anda partnership: the first two American journalism schools were established. The University of Missouri’s opened in 1908, Columbia’s in 1912. It was with this professionalized future in view, and the related hope that journalists would be accredited and socially respected (not to mention held accountable) in the way that doctors and lawyers were, that the columnist Walter Lippmann declared in a 1919 essay for The Atlantic that “the ideal of objective testimony is cardinal” in the training of any journalist. It was the first time that anyone prominently connected the scientific notion of objectivity with the practice of news gathering.

Emerging from the propagandistic news environment of World War I, Lippmann wanted the next generation of journalism to be driven by “not the slick persons who scoop the news, but the patient and fearless men of science who have labored to see what the world really is.” He and other proponents never claimed that true objectivity was attainable in journalism—only that true liberty of opinion required “as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.”

This distinction is crucial, and too often forgotten.

To stand up for the 100-year-old ideal of objectivity is “terribly unpopular in my profession these days,” the retired Boston Globe and Washington Post editor Marty Baron observed in March. He made the important point that objectivity is not a way of moving through the world. It’s a method, and a rigorous one at that. And the fact that we are beginning to expect less of journalists than we do of doctors and judges, when it comes to setting personal views aside in the workplace, says something about the post-professional turn the field has taken.

Reporters themselves are not fully to blame for this shift; journalism, especially local journalism, is undergoing an institutional collapse. (Whether it can rebuild, and how, is a major question.) Replacing inherently imperfect objectivity with transparency is often described as a moral imperative, but that’s hardly the whole story. Profile-enhancing social media rewards snap judgments and conviction far more than open-mindedness or “naive empiricism.” If a reporter can avoid getting fired for it, abandoning impartiality is a smart career move.

The degree to which Van Anda’s reporters were asked to efface themselves seems inconceivable, perhaps intolerable, today. News pages displayed no opinions and virtually no bylines. For a time, names were not even allowed on company business cards. What the paper did instead was pay employees to lose themselves in a particular type of important work, one that forced them to be more open-minded than the average reader.

The push for more “views from somewhere” drops this formidable demand. And although the transparency model appears to encourage healthy debate, the opposite might just as well be true. “Disclaimer: I’m biased” easily becomes “This is my truth, so don’t argue with it.” Agendas would (supposedly) be acknowledged under this new approach, but they would also proliferate. And thinking that the good causes would gain more oxygen than the bad ones is naive.

Histories of American journalism generally understate the importance of the Ochs–Van Anda partnership in favor of the famous rivalry between Pulitzer and Hearst. But a look at changes happening nearly simultaneously at the Times sheds important light on where we are today. In particular, it helps us see how much intelligence and dedication went into creating the standard of objectivity that now looks so wobbly. The facts will become less clear and the media less credible in its absence.

Van Anda himself is partly to blame for being overlooked. He refused to be interviewed by the trade journals that were keen to celebrate him, and he has mostly been lost to history. Just one biography of him was published—in 1933, 12 years before he died. Ochs, in a fit of jealousy, complained that the book gave his managing editor too much credit for the paper’s success, and Van Anda later agreed to have all copies withdrawn. Even when his own legacy was at stake, he preferred facts to arguments.

This essay was adapted from Darrell Hartman’s forthcoming book, Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media.