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Oct. 29th, 2008 10:16 am
Media bias, encapsulated
This piece is fantastic
( Some key excerpts: )
ETA for a bit of commentary:
I love all of this, but I especially like his pointing out that journalism should be approached like a science--subject to verifiability and peer review.
A journalist's sole responsibility is to the facts of the story. That includes facts that underlie the surface issue of the story.
We would never, for instance, report without comment or rebuttal a quote from someone who insists the moon is made of green cheese, because we know for established, scientific fact that that's false. We can report that that person THINKS the moon is made of green cheese, but we cannot just give that person a soapbox for that belief without any sort of framing of the assertion as patently false.
The same principle is true for hundreds of other established facts that are often treated by news media as opinion: The capability of same-sex parents, for instance, or man-made contributions to global warming.
Fact is what we trade on. And we must, therefore, first establish what a fact is--something empirically derived, and not just the opinion of laypeople or pseudoscience--before we can begin to discharge our duties as reporters of facts.
Whether those facts dovetail with and therefore confirm the beliefs of the masses is irrelevant. Even if a majority of laypeople think, for instance, that global warming doesn't exist, we still cannot report on that issue as if such an assumption is at all factual.
From a business standpoint, it's supposedly necessary to engage in some level of confirmation bias for our target demographics. But when doing that ultimately destroys our credibility so that people no longer trust us, we're going to lose audience in the end anyway.
It makes far more sense for us to report the truth, as empirically derived, and ultimately build our credibility to a point that audiences are drawn in on that alone.
If we don't do this--if what we produce is nothing more than a fact-lite echo chamber for the uninformed--we are derelict in our duties, and don't even deserve to call ourselves journalists.
( Some key excerpts: )
ETA for a bit of commentary:
I love all of this, but I especially like his pointing out that journalism should be approached like a science--subject to verifiability and peer review.
A journalist's sole responsibility is to the facts of the story. That includes facts that underlie the surface issue of the story.
We would never, for instance, report without comment or rebuttal a quote from someone who insists the moon is made of green cheese, because we know for established, scientific fact that that's false. We can report that that person THINKS the moon is made of green cheese, but we cannot just give that person a soapbox for that belief without any sort of framing of the assertion as patently false.
The same principle is true for hundreds of other established facts that are often treated by news media as opinion: The capability of same-sex parents, for instance, or man-made contributions to global warming.
Fact is what we trade on. And we must, therefore, first establish what a fact is--something empirically derived, and not just the opinion of laypeople or pseudoscience--before we can begin to discharge our duties as reporters of facts.
Whether those facts dovetail with and therefore confirm the beliefs of the masses is irrelevant. Even if a majority of laypeople think, for instance, that global warming doesn't exist, we still cannot report on that issue as if such an assumption is at all factual.
From a business standpoint, it's supposedly necessary to engage in some level of confirmation bias for our target demographics. But when doing that ultimately destroys our credibility so that people no longer trust us, we're going to lose audience in the end anyway.
It makes far more sense for us to report the truth, as empirically derived, and ultimately build our credibility to a point that audiences are drawn in on that alone.
If we don't do this--if what we produce is nothing more than a fact-lite echo chamber for the uninformed--we are derelict in our duties, and don't even deserve to call ourselves journalists.
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