Fairness in Political Reporting
Most reputable publications strive for neutral, unbiased reporting. Reporters must remove their opinions and prejudices from their work and that isn't always a simple task nor is it obvious how biases creep into their stories.Journalists commonly introduce bias through inconsiderate selection of sources. This can mean misrepresenting communities by lack of diversity or only voices from one side of a debate.
A great example of this type of bias occurred in 1989 shortly after the U.S. invasion of Panama.
The Washington Post published an article detailing the mechanics and aftermath of the invasion but only included sources from with the U.S. military and American government officials. In my opinion this was a great injustice to the American and Panamanian peoples considering the large toll the invasion took on Panama citizens at great cost to American tax payers.
While the American military deserved a large space in the article there should have been some form of balancing discussion, perhaps from a human rights group or an average Panamanian whose life was affected by the invasion.
Bias introduction also commonly occurs within the framing of a story. The examples I present to you come from two major news networks many people believe to cater to people on opposite ends of the American political spectrum, Fox News and NBC news.
These two networks framed their recent stories about the government shutdown talks in very different ways.
Fox focused more on the heated discourse and name calling that existed within the discussion while pushing the actual political positions of the parties deep within the story.
NBC included some of the more stirring rhetoric but in my opinion generally focused more clearly on the nuts and bolts of what is happening in D.C.
At any rate, the stories read in different ways despite drawing from the same news event and illustrate the importance of framing.
I think when reporting on a political story, it shouldn't be that hard to separate your bias from the story. Politics have a lot of facts in them and lots of people are involved. This also means that there are LOTS of sources you can talk to about a story to keep it balanced. But for some stories, it may be hard to get the other side when it's a foreign country.
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ReplyDeleteRegarding the WAPO and Panama... I wonder how difficult it was to report accurately in Panama at the time. I can only speculate, but there probably wasn't a good relationship between Panamanian citizens and American journalists. But I think those kinds of issues lead to biased reporting just as much as personal politics do. The reporter is either too lazy or not skilled enough to get perspective from all sides involved. And, thus, a biased story.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with journalism, especially now, is that there simply isn't time to create a perfectly rounded, balanced piece from every perspective. The best we can do is highlight the key opinions on any subject but even that is biased. Who decides what the key opinions are? I think everything is going to be biased because we are human, we aren't Vulcans from Star Trek, we have inherent biases. Our job is to minimize that as much as possible by using credible sources.
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