Big discussion on Jay Rosen’s blog regarding issues of media bias, balance, and fairness.
Rosen doesn’t think ‘bias’ is a helpful term at all, since
any work of journalism is saturated with bias from the moment the reporter leaves the office–and probably before that–to the edited and finished product.
There’s bias in the conversation our biased reporter has with his biased editor, bias in the call list he develops for his story, bias in his choice of events to go out and cover, bias in the details he writes down at the event, bias in his lead paragraph, bias in the last paragraph, bias when his editor cuts a graph. The headline someone else writes for him– that has bias. There’s bias in the placement of the story. (No bias in the pixels or printer’s ink, though.)
Two of Rosen’s readers reframe the question, therefore:
Any selection of facts will necessarily represent a bias. I think the main problem most Americans have with the current incarnation of the mainstream media is not that they have biases, but rather that they all share the same rather narrow biases, a reflection of the fact that almost all the media is now controlled and produced by a very narrow and unrepresentative slice of the population.
And:
The overriding value in journalism, along with accuracy, must be not objectivity but fairness. Not the kind of fairness wherein for every Hannity you have a Colmes, but the kind of fairness where, regardless of the journalist’s personal feelings, he or she can judge a piece of reporting on whether all the important points of view have had a legitimate chance to change minds.
Though we at HonestReporting sometimes use the term ‘bias’ to describe problematic Mideast coverage, ‘fairness’ might be a more appropriate term in many cases. And there is certainly a narrow, pack mentality among many Israel correspondents that results in unbalanced coverage of this conflict.
