29 Comments

1. LTCTed:

I believe unbiased reporting is possible. It may be boring. The lead, “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton held a birthday party yesterday at her Chappaqua home in honor of her husband, former president William J. Clinton”, is distinguished by a choice of words carrying minimal “baggage” or “nuance”. The unobjective journalist wishing to distance, under the guise of “reportage”, Senator Clinton from, say, the working class, might write, “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton laid on a birthday bash at her Chappaqua mansion, feasting her husband, Bill, the ex-president and millionaire lecturer.”

They are not entirely parallel, but illustatre my point.

Regards,
Ted

May 25, 2008 - 10:26 am 2. freetotem:

The question whether unbiased reporting is possible is a corollary question to whether truth is possible or knowledge possible, metaphysical and epistemological questions the most profound minds have wrestled with throughout history. Whether or not pure objectivity is achievable, not even attempting to approach it, while essentially lying to your readers that you are, is a far cry from such a lofty question.

This one more example of the intellectual and moral rot postmodernism and poststructuralism have wrought on out culture. These intellectual themes have taken the important realization that “narratives” have contexts, not puire objectivity, and used that as an excuse to abandon wholesale any attempt to even approach truth. It is accompanied by a smirking condescension toward anyone so naive as to imagine truth is possible. But these people think they know the truth and want to use any means necessary to convince the rest of us of the validity of it. By any means necessary, including opinion pieces masquerading as statments of fact.

This is no different than the Saul Alinsky school of “social activism” that Hillary and Obama arte both steeped in. It is the philospohy of the contemporary Left.

May 25, 2008 - 11:45 am 3. Insufficiently Sensitive:

It is possible, if one defies the perfect in favor of the good.

Reporters and editors, even if strongly opinionated, could research a story for facts supporting their own viewpoint, and then round out the production by researching in equal measure the facts opposing it. Such behavior should be a hallmark of an educated citizen. Currently, they appear to stop after step 1, having no sympathy nor consideration for all the members of the greater community who might feel differently.

A ritual stab is sometimes made at taking step 2. To find the trace evidence for this, read the last three paragraphs of any article in question.

And the placement of those grudging admissions from step 2 – buried – is in turn the strongest evidence that those reporters and editors consider their jobs to be the bulldozing of public opinion, rather than the informing the public of all the necessary items required to make intelligent decisions at election time.

Thus did the anti-establishment movement of the 60s emplace itself in the campus, the media and the legal profession with the goal of ‘making a difference’. Like most other pet phrases of that generation, the goal was disguised while the activity – social change, making a difference, whatever – was stressed as a Good Thing. In terms of an informed citizenry, it is not a Good Thing, and blinds us deliberately to half the spectrum of events.

May 25, 2008 - 11:45 am 4. Kendall:

Unbiased reporting is not possible because it requires the reader to be unbiased as well. People will read bias into anything, no matter how phrased… Also seemingly unbiased reporting can mask errors of omission, so even if something appears unbiased you cannot trust it fully.

Thus it’s better to make clear on the reporting side what bias is present to make reading easier and to make more clear which side merits additional research. Then the reader can find that data as needed, or someone can work on gathering and posting it.

May 25, 2008 - 12:18 pm 5. Joan of Argghh!:

The reporting bias isn’t the problem. The staffing bias is the problem.

If everyone on staff leans in the same direction, your ship is gonna go down one day.

But, like Hollywood, the MSM cannot hear the other side of things, and so portrays, “objectivity” as a perception of how they think the opposition thinks.

Until they hire and respect differing opinions, there is no reason to rely on most media outlets. Thank heavens for the blogosphere.

May 25, 2008 - 12:25 pm 6. LTEC:

I assume that (reasonably) unbiased reporting is possible, and that how to do this constitutes 99% of what is taught in Schools of Journalism. Otherwise, what would be the point of Schools of Journalism?

May 25, 2008 - 12:42 pm 7. Ken Hahn:

I don’t believe unbiased reporting is humanly possible. But I think that biases should be acknowledged. So long as the NYT lists itself as a subsidiary of the Democratic Party, it can print anything it wants.

May 25, 2008 - 2:03 pm 8. TC@LeatherPenguin:

“My question to you – is unbiased reporting even possible? If you think it is, how would you go about it?”

Easy. Reporters are restricted to nouns and verbs. No flowery language; no metaphors; no use of allegory. No adjectives that can redirect the facts.

Just report the facts of what happened and/or was actually said. No adding an “ly” comment that grasps at changes of the view that the reality presents.

Don’t do what seems the new status quo for all MSM reporters, which demands to refine, and re-define, the public conversation according to relatively incoherent rules.

May 25, 2008 - 2:13 pm 9. Quilly_Mammoth:

When I was taking journalism courses at Temple, and writing for the Temple News, I was told to make the first few paragraphs Who, What, Where and When…the strict Dragnet approach. Then the rest of the piece should be the Why based on the facts you presented at first.

As TC said “No flowery language; no metaphors; no use of allegory. No adjectives that can redirect the facts.”. That was for later. And even back in those dark ages Journalism Professors were just to the left of Lenin.

However, it should be noted that editors back then were less bold and more sly than the myrmidons of Pinchy. They simply didn’t publish on those things they disagreed with. Doing the four W’s matters not if it doesn’t see the light of day.

So which is better? Not reporting on certain things or reporting with obvious bias?

May 25, 2008 - 3:01 pm 10. Dave:

It appears that they changed the URL.
Here’s the new URL.

May 25, 2008 - 3:14 pm 11. Alec Rawls:

Of course it is possible to be unbiased, so long as one does not confuse this with not taking a position. If you honestly follow reason and evidence, and don’t assert more than you honestly have grounds to assert, or omit relevant facts and conclusions that you do have grounds to assert, then you are unbiased. To say that it is not possible to be unbiased is to say that there is no such thing as the honest following if reason and evidence.

This is in fact the left wing position. Remember those dirtbag sociologists at Stanford and Berkeley business schools (of all places) who characterized conservatives as “dogmatic,” “mentally rigid,” “intolerant of ambiguity,” and driven by “fear and anger”? Their procedural assumption was that EVERYONE’s thinking can be described as “motivated social cognition.” That is their term for the assumption that thinks backwards, starting with the conclusions that they want to reach, and using their cognitive faculties to find the most convincing way to arrive at those conclusions.

Obviously their own paper is an exemplar of this cognitive style. How could it not be, when this is the only cognitive style that the authors even recognize as possible. But of course it is total nonsense to say that people can ONLY think backwards. It is also possible to follow reason and evidence, both on matters of fact and matters of value.

As long as a person is thinking frontwards, they can be better at it or worse at it, but we credit them with trying to be objective. If they are good at thinking frontwards, then they succeed at being objective. When someone is being biased, that is in general a reference to thinking backwards, trying to arrive at favored conclusions instead of following reason and evidence.

This biased-backwards thinking is indeed ALL that is ever seen on the left (including the mainstream center-left which dominates academia and the press). They justify it by claiming that is the only possible cognitive style, but most conservatives actually follow reason and evidence. This is the great divide in America today, between those who think backwards (Democrat-left intellectuals, and their followers), and those who think frontwards (Republican-conservative intellectuals, and their followers).

Objectivity most certainly is possible, but only conservatives practice it. This goes even into the hard sciences, as demonstrated by the hoax of human caused global warming. Even as the real danger–global cooling–is actually starting to take place, the vast majority of scientific funding goes to those who are trying to make the best sounding case they can for the danger of human caused warming, no matter how scientifically dishonest.

Here is pure backwards thinking, in the SCIENCES, and it doesn’t get any better in the spheres of social science and politics. PURE backwards thinking utterly dominates the left. So of course they don’t think anything else is possible. Conservatives ARE better, but we also need to KNOW better.

Of course objectivity is possible. Objectivity just means thinking straight about fact and value. If your assertions of fact and value are properly limited to what you honestly have grounds to assert, and do not omit contradictory considerations that you also have grounds to assert, you are unbiased.

May 25, 2008 - 3:46 pm 12. Bobby_B:

Bias can manifest itself in far too many ways to count.

Should we cover this story? Should we ignore it?

Should we look at this topic and find a way to make a story out of it?

Should we list every fact that we know (beyond doubt) is true about this story? Some? Just these four over here that we think are important?

Should we use non-verifiable information from sources about the story? Should we make it clear the source hasn’t been verified? Should we put in facts that work against the theme we’d like the story to create? If so, should we denigrate, overtly or not, its sources?

Should we draw conclusions in our story? Do our facts have to support our conclusion?

Can we use the phrases “some people think”, or “many members feel” – phrases that convey a broadness of application that may or may not be warranted – or do we need to make clear the scope of the group of adherents to any feeling or belief or statement?

Can we outright lie about facts?

All such decisions will be informed by whatever bias the writer holds.

Given that, in my lifetime, I’ve had personal involvement in about twenty stories that made the national press, and that the reporting in every instance has resulted in stories that were factually wrong in central ways, biased in the selection of sources, and just generally failed to convey what really happened, I have no confidence that anyting I read about something that I’ve not witnessed is worth the reading time. Best practice, I guess, is to read at least five different sources – with varying political leanings – before thinking you know squat about a story.

May 25, 2008 - 4:25 pm 13. Section9:

Look, I know it’s the Times

The NYT is a propaganda organ for the Democratic Party. That’s all it should be treated as.

That said, they’re not making this up out of whole cloth. Unfortunately. There’s fire where there’s smoke.

That said, McCain’s campaign has shown enough lack of enthusiasm and a marked inability to raise the cascade of cash that marked BC ‘04 that tells me that the Serious Money People don’t take JMC seriously.

McCain rubbed a lot of people the wrong way over the years. As that was the case, it was incumbent upon him to organize a staff and a campaign that was, to put it simply, No Mistakes in both Message and Fundraising.

I am pleasantly surprised that JMC appears to have the rapid-reaction thing down pat, although he does get caught with his gonads showing sometimes (the Ed Schultz thing was unforgivable; he should have torn Barack’s gonads off after that and made an issue of it for at least a news cycle-instead, he and his advisors dropped it and let Barack skip away. It appears that after Bush’s visit to Israel he has learned that to dominate the News Cycle is to win…).

However, Pat Ruffini’s appeals for online modernization have gone unanswered. Barack’s Campaign is truly 21st Century, while McCain is stuck back in the 2000 Campaign. The difference in the Available Money is, to put it mildly, enormous. Yes, issues matter. Yes, character counts. But you have to help yourself by using the latest tools, and I don’t think that “Team Maverick” even comes close to Obama.

May 25, 2008 - 5:58 pm 14. wlpeak:

OK, we all fell for the misdirection.

‘Objective Journalism’ isn’t about being objective, a very dubious proposition, but rather about making the attempt, playing fair, giving the opposing sides the benefit of the doubt, you know, intellectual integrity.

This philosophizing of the question is a canard designed to reframe the question, inoculate the polemicist from accusations of bias, and relieve them of the burden of facing their opponents better arguments.

May 25, 2008 - 6:45 pm 15. Donna B.:

In “How the Scots Invented the Modern World” I remember reading about some of the very first political journals published. When one was accused of bias, the response was along the lines of “Of course. What would be the point if not?”

I’d look up the exact words, but my children steal my books.

Long before I read that book, I worked typesetting and layout at a locally owned newspaper. I went to a school board meeting on my own for some reason, then was typesetting the reporter’s write-up the next day.

I went to the reporter and told him that’s not what I remembered happening. He told me “Tough. That’s what this newspaper is reporting.” Of course he informed the editor and I set nothing but Ann Landers and the farm report for two weeks.

So, I think objective reporting may be possible, but I don’t think many in the “news industry” see it as desirable.

May 25, 2008 - 8:31 pm 16. Milan:

Sure, there can be relatively unbiased reporting. I think much more of it existed before Watergate. Since then it seems like journalism has appealed to persons who wish a bit of celebrity and to be admired as talking heads explaining issues to the unwashed. This without any idea of balancing conservative types of explanations that were very common during the pre ’60’s. One of the reasons that the Blogosphere is so great is that there is plenty of analysis and opinion that one can choose based on the consumers’ idea of meritocracy. One can find many bloggers who continually out-think the mummified mainstream media. And they still don’t get it!

May 25, 2008 - 8:37 pm 17. Sissy Willis:

Who but a liberal — progressive? — would believe in such a thing as “objective” writing? Any writing worth reading has a point of view.

May 26, 2008 - 4:03 am 18. iceberg:

It’s a question of fairness not objectivity.

A good editor must demand it and that means red pencilling sly innuendo, biassed adjectives, unwarranted inference, irresponsible implications — leave that to the columnists. That’s why a paper has columnists – to be biassed the way a news column mustn’t be.

But that kind of direction has to come from the top — and the top has to be a community leader. BUt the NYT is no longer a community leaders, it’s down there grovelling for popularity with the Post and the Enguirer, see last Sun’s narccissistic orgy about the chick trying to get it on online.

May 26, 2008 - 5:03 am 19. Joe Schmoe:

Several years ago, I spent some time listening to a radio station in Belfast, Northern Ireland called Cool FM. It is a generic teenage/early 20’s pop music station. I listened to it because Cool FM streams its broadcasts over the Internet, and I worked in a high-rise office building where it was impossible to get radio reception. When I had a late night at the office, I’d stream Cool FM to keep myself awake. Every hour or so, Cool FM station would do five minutes of local news from Belfast.

The news reports were the most neutral and objective pieces of journalism you’ve ever heard. The radio station would report the facts, get a quote from the IRA, and get a quote from the chief of police, and move on to the next story. In the next story, they’d quote the police first and the IRA second.

It was impossible to detect any bias whatsoever in the station’s reporting. It was as if someone was holding a gun to the copy writer’s head and forcing him to be objective and neutral. And in essence, that’s exactly what was going on. The station didn’t want to take sides in the “Troubles,” so it scrupulously maintained its objectivity.

This experience left no doubt in my mind that unbiased journalism is indeed possible. If other reporters had to operate under such conditions, they’d be surprisingly non-ideological.

May 26, 2008 - 6:19 am 20. nutiket:

Reasonably unbiased reporting requires honorable reporters. Of course, this disqualifies almost all NYT reporters.

May 26, 2008 - 7:40 am 21. digitante:

Roger,

Excellent question. I think objectivity is something to aspire to but that can never be totally achieved. The aspiration is important, though, because it asks us to continuously check and recheck ourselves as well as our assumptions. It makes us look at our own work from different perspectives. I feel the most unbiased reporting I tend to get is from NPR, although there are people who would rail against NPR as a tool of the left.

What’s been most shocking to me is the rather bald-faced manner in which most of the MSM is abandoning even the aspiration to objectivity. This is especially true when it comes to photo choice. There was one egregious example on latimes.com a few months back: Obama was pictured giving a speech, his head cocked slightly to one side, his finger pointing upwards. I believe it was at the Biltmore downtown. Overhead, there was an enormous light fixture with a circular feature hanging down, out of which came the lights. The photographer positioned the fixture around Obama’s head so that it framed it and looked like a combination halo/crown of thorns. It made me ill. It would have been one thing had the article been about the deification of Obama by his followers. But it was your standard, everyday “Obama gives a speech in downtown L.A.” article.

When the Los Angeles Times starts borrowing from religious iconography to make a political candidate look saintly, we have to ask ourselves how the more subtle and less transparent choices they make influence our view of the candidates.

I grabbed another great example off the web in September. This was about the time the media decided they’d start telling their “breakdown of the Clinton machine vs. the Obama phenom” story.

Over His Shoulder

May 26, 2008 - 7:40 am 22. Insufficiently Sensitive:

I feel the most unbiased reporting I tend to get is from NPR, although there are people who would rail against NPR as a tool of the left.

Well, I am one of those people. I notice that you haven’t made the least effort to inquire why we should have that opinion.

Look at my last sentence. Now consider: NPR does not make the least effort to inquire into a great number of items, situations, circumstances, procedures and trends, all of which are damned important to the opinions on our side of the fence.

And those gaping exclusions are just the reason we might rail against the cozy self-satisfied entity called NPR.

Its sound production is superb – more than likely, a large part of the taxpayer funding it has enjoyed went into the top-of-the-line audio gear and networking equipment used to convey its precious pronouncements to the urban sophisticates who dwell on every word.

Please enjoy your membership in that equaler-than-others club, but when you’re not too busy, consider that there are a lot of us out here with the audacity to hold diverse opinions – and that NPR is the last organization in the country to ever consider producing, on an equal-time basis, news and ‘information’ that would make us think that we were included in the ‘National’ portion of public radio.

May 26, 2008 - 10:07 am 23. Gary Rosen:

I don’t think it’s possible to be “perfectly” unbiased, but I think you can come a hell of a lot closer than the MSM does these days. And while I usually don’t subscribe to “good old days” theories, I think it’s gotten much worse in recent years. Reporters have *always* leaned to the left. But in the past there were two things that balanced off this bias.

First, it used to be that the objective of reporting was to relate *facts*. Of course you can still inject a lot of bias just with “facts”, by omitting some and overemphasizing others. Nevertheless if the goal is to report facts, you might actually get some facts. Nowadays the goal is to tell a “narrative”. You can tell this even when the story is not ideologically charged. News articles used to start off, “such and such happened yesterday”, or “The President announced …” etc. Now nearly every story starts with a tear-jerky anecdote about some otherwise completely non-newsworthy individual. The saying “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story” is now the operating imperative for most news organizations.

The other factor that used to balance off reporter liberalism was the fact that most publishers were conservative Republicans. They were self-made men and strong believers in capitalism and free enterprise. The LA Times, Chi Tribune and NY Daily News used to be very Republican and right-wing. Now the newspapers are run by their scions, effete dilletantes who have never had to work an honest day in their life, have had everything handed to them and are therefore consumed by leftist guilt. Case in point: Pinch Sulzberger (though the NY Times admittedly was leftist even in the old days).

May 26, 2008 - 11:18 am 24. Lem:

In baseball the commentators are made up of the play by play announcer, who is not supposed to cheer for anybody, and the annalist who can pretty much say anything.

I think is possible for the writer to try to balance the two withing a story. But the analysis should be held to a minimum, and always should be buttressed by the facts.

While it may not be possible to write completely bias free, the writer could try.

Rupert Murdoch’s comment that he thought some Wall Street Journal columns were too long doesn’t help.

May 26, 2008 - 4:30 pm 25. youngowens:

I know how to create unbiased reporting. Here is what you do: for every story, you have two writers. One of them is a bona fide conservative. The other is a bona fide liberal. You assign them the story as a team and you tell them that they must spend every working hour together until they come up with a story they are both ready to sign off on.

Voila! Unbiased journalism.

Roger — I am highly confident that this would work. You should put it together on Pajamas. I’ll be one of the conservatives.

May 26, 2008 - 5:05 pm 26. Mike K:

Nagourney is the guy that Cheney famously agreed “Big Time!” And he still is.

May 26, 2008 - 9:13 pm 27. AlanC:

I’m a little surprised that this hasn’t been mentioned more in all the comments.

There are two sides to bias, what you put in and what you leave out.

It is easier to deal with a specific report / article / story than with the corporation as a whole. But, obviously, this applies at both levels.

The thing I find most disgusting is that there is no honor shown by reporters. There is an honorable way to report the news whether you are biased or not.

The honorable way is to include all facts and verify that they ARE facts. I have seen too many stories where “facts” and “figures” are quoted that are palbable falsities. 1,000 is not 100,000 no matter how much you want it to be. Saying that a situation is TWICE as bad may be true or false (see health reporting). Saying that the odds went from .001 to .002 is a necessary fact, too. But without that part of the “fact” the reader won’t be able to tell if the odds really changed significantly.

Additionally there are the unsourced comments. Who says something is just as important as what was said. That’s the only way a consumer would have the faintest chance of determining the bias or import of the source. This is also a gray area because many of the “sources” are the reporters themselves (see Paleo stringers).

Honesty and honor would go a long way to solving the problem of bias.

May 27, 2008 - 7:55 am 28. mojo:

Not possible, so don’t even try. Announce your bias up front and write a good stick. That’s all I ask.

Think Mark Twain. Unbiased observer? Not hardly. But a hell of a good read, as a general rule. Ditto Mencken.

The pretense of objective newsies is insulting.

May 27, 2008 - 10:13 am 29. Tom Grey - Liberty Dad:

Balance is possible — by accepting strong bias both for and against somebody.

Facts are not only boring, they are almost meaningless, by themselves. Thus, the “big truth” is the story that the facts support.

Balance would be to have two short, biased stories on the same facts — with an inside / hyperlinked boring encyclopedia fact listing.

May 28, 2008 - 10:08 am

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