On ‘media bias’
It was never really about bias, but about the inescapable truth that we each view the world through our own unique prisms, shaped by life experiences and other influences. Non-disclosure of those worldviews just makes things shady. Jeff Jarvis:
[J]ournalists do not own or even decide the truth. It is their job to help the public decide what is true. And so the public has a right to know what journalists bring to their stories so the public can make better judgments. The one real lesson the internet and the advent of two-way media has brought to the masters of old media is that they did not own trust. The journalists thought they could just tell the public to trust them and accept what they said as the truth. But they never really could.
At every journalism seminar like this, someone asks whether readers will trust a reporter covering an election after knowing how the reporter votes or what party she belongs to. I argue that the readers wonder and speculate about this anyway and so once it is out in the open, then the discussion can turn to the reporting: ‘Having said that I’m a liberal, now you can judge my work on its completeness, fairness, and accuracy.’ There is no agenda worse than a hidden agenda.
Filed under: Blogging, Broadcast Audio, Life, Media, News, People I Know, Politics, Television
It has always been scary to me that so few people have considered this point to be obvious. The posture of objectivity is itself inherently dishonest. Objectivity and fairness are not necessarily related–in fact, one could argue that the self-deception involved in crating the false sense of objectivity mitigates against the likelihood of fairness. Nor is the ability to present views other than one’s own necessarily rocket science–it’s what we all used to learn on the high school debate team.