How 'Balanced' News Distorts
Reflective journalists understand that objectivity is a pretty impossible ideal even as they strive to be as neutral as possible. Some journalists see fairness and balance as more realistic counters to objectivity, while others conflate fairness/balance/objectivity. Sociological research in the 70's advanced the idea that journalists have practices that give the appearance of objectivity-- quoting official people from "both sides" of an issue; writing in the inverted pyramid etc -- but ultimately, objectivity is in the routine, what sociologist Gaye Tuchman called the "strategic ritual of objectivity," not in the product. When this is understood, debates over whether the media have a liberal or conservative bias are beside the point: there is a professional bias, and that bias tends to reinforce existing status structures.
This is why the question of "media bias" is far more complex from a scholarly point of view; journalism scholars don't go around saying, "Let me go off an determine whether there is a liberal or conservative bias here." It's not really the right question.
But we still have to deal with the issue of objectivity, a God-term for journalists and the public, which has been conditioned to expect certain things from media. Objectivity has many critics these days, from philosophers of science who don't believe in it to press critics. The thrust of the debate in journalism is not an effort to jettison the ideal of objectivity; the goal is to understand how notions of objectivity and its sweet faced-but-sometimes-sinister cousin, balance, can actually distort the truth. Brent Cunningham, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, discusses some of the problems in a piece that is available online. Writing in the midst of post-September 11 press timidity, Cunningham had many examples to draw on to make the point that balance can create false dichotomies, narraow debate with simplistic views of an argument having only two sides ("both sides of the story"), and result in reporters pursuing the wrong story. He writes:
But our pursuit of objectivity can trip us up on the way to "truth." Objectivity excuses lazy reporting. If you're on deadline and all you have is "both sides of the story," that's often good enough. It's not that such stories laying out the parameters of a debate have no value for readers, but too often, in our obsession with, as The Washington Post's Bob Woodward puts it, "the latest," we fail to push the story, incrementally, toward a deeper understanding of what is true and what is false. Steven R. Weisman, the chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and a believer in the goal of objectivity ("even though we fall short of the ideal every day"), concedes that he felt obliged to dig more when he was an editorial writer, and did not have to be objective. "If you have to decide who is right, then you must do more reporting," he says. "I pressed the reporting further because I didn't have the luxury of saying X says this and Y says this and you, dear reader, can decide who is right."
Cunninham also explores the problems created when reporters, restricted by the rules of objectivity, don't inject issues or raise questions that official sources have not put on the table for discussion:
It exacerbates our tendency to rely on official sources, which is the easiest, quickest way to get both the "he said" and the "she said," and, thus, "balance." According to numbers from the media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 stories on Iraq broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from last September to February, all but thirty-four originated at the White House, Pentagon, and State Department. So we end up with too much of the "official" truth.
If you've read an article about an issue and walked away with the sense that the article was just wrong but couldn't put your finger on the problem, you were probably encountering an article in which the need to achieve balance caused a journalist to skew an issue. FOX News' use of "fair and balanced" as a trademark is problematic not just because the network is neither; the network has increased misunderstanding about the term. Liberals want FOX to be more balanced, and conservatives wish more networks were balanced like FOX. What would a "balanced" story about Adolf Hitler have looked like. Should the KKK get balanced coverage? These are extreme examples, I concede. A more typical example might be the way abortion debates are represented as a fight between pro-life and what?...anti-life people? A friend once noted that she had watched a televised discussion of global warming that, had she been less informed, would have caused her to think that there are just two sides to that discussion.
One of my favorite examples of how the professional concern with balance can completely distort an issue is distilled in a book by journalism scholar David T.Z. Mindich, Just the Facts: How Objectivity Came to Define Journalism.
Mindich used The New York Times' late 19 th century coverage of the lynching of black Americans to demonstrate how the pursuit of balance can obfuscate the truth by setting up a contest between often arbitrary dichotomies. To the Times, the lynching problem pitted vigilante white mobs against savage blacks that, inherent tendencies to rape and maul aside, needed to be processed through the legal system. (As Mindich reported, the Times editorial called for the government to act swifter to serve justice and decrease mob violence.) By journalistic standards and the prejudices of the era, the Times provided a balanced accounting, but Mindich has shown that such arbitrary assignment of sides did little for the truth. That role went to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the black publisher and anti-lynching crusader who went out to interview people with firsthand knowledge of the cases reported in the Times. Wells learned that many innocent black men were accused: white women who were presented as rape victims had been involved in consensual relationships with black men who were lynched, and some black people were lynched when they opened stores or sought other economic opportunities. Although she was an advocate and hence, not a disinterested, objective reporter, Wells got closer to "the truth" than the most respected newspaper of the day.
Some things to think about:
How does the need to write a balanced account that gives each side the precise number of words and quotations confuse rather than promote understanding? People in their everyday life hold journalism products to notions of objectivity and balance that are not easily adjudicated, least of all by people who are upset because the news or the commentator is expressing a worldview with which they do not agree. The result is often a stalemate that gives journalists an easy out: if both sides are upset, journalists reason, they must have done something right. They see this as evidence that they have achieved a certain balance. The Ida B. Wells-Barnett case demonstrates that balance can be achieved by balancing two completely incorrect arguments. Journalists, reeaders, and viewers take up the cause for a concept, balance, that has a more dangerous side than many realize.
11:58:20 AM 
|
|
