Oct. 29th, 2008 10:16 am
Media bias, encapsulated
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textualdevianceThis piece is fantastic
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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.
A couple of years ago, I was invited to join a discussion club about current events and the moderator asked us to begin by sharing what media sources we knew "could be trusted." Each of us cited magazines, newspapers, Web sites, books, writers, radio shows and other sources we had found reliable. What we were citing, though -- it struck me even then and with a chill -- were sources that felt reliable because they confirmed what we already "knew" -- sources that buttressed our worldview.
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If people attracted to the same news sources constitute markets, businesses can figure out what those markets want and provide more of it. With most products, that's a very good thing. With news, however, it creates a dangerous feedback loop. News consumers want the truth, and news that confirms their worldview feels true. News producers try to satisfy their customers, and the news they provide therefore solidifies their customers' worldview and makes it feel more true, which stabilizes this market and enables businesses to fine-tune the product aimed at it.
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This is not a "right" or a "left" thing. It's not even a "center" thing. News is not truer just because it gives equal weight to two extremes. Imagine if a journalist reporting from Nazi Germany in the 1930s had said that some people liked Hitler, some hated him, and the truth "lay in the middle." In retrospect, we would question his dedication to journalistic standards, because sometimes the truth lies closer to one end. We need better criteria than mere balance for evaluating the truth of news statements, criteria that lie outside any framework or worldview. Can such criteria exist? They already do. Journalism schools have been refining and teaching them for two centuries. Until recently, journalists held one another to these standards.
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But what if rumors and newspapers merge? That's where I see us heading now. If professionalism in journalism is destroyed, rumor will rule, and then how will we know what's true? More important, how will we dissolve all our warring camps and forge a single nation again if we can't unite around some truth we hold to be self-evident?
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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