In what fantasy universe do news organizations report in a neutral, un-biased fashion?
First of all, it is impossible to ‘report’ anything in an ‘unbiased’ fashion. Everything we do in life is affected by our biases, our past experiences, whether we consciously think about it or not. Perception is altered by such biases, and reporting is as much affected by perception as it is by conscious effort to promulgate a view. A reporter who has grown up in a poor inner city area will have a different perception than one who grew up in a well-to-do suburban setting; it would be impossible for both reporters to view a story the same way and report it without letting their biases affect what they say and how they say it.
Secondly, reporting in America has never been about neutrality. Indeed, the First Amendment has often been characterized as creating a ‘marketplace of ideas’ for people to review. Prominent in creating this gallery of differing viewpoints have been the newspapers (and, by extension, the television stations). Indeed, as noted by RTFirefly, the late 19th Century newspapers were so noted for their advocacy in ‘reporting’ news that their methodology acquired a name: ‘yellow journalism’. Modern papers often let the opinions of their editorial staff color the news they report, both content and style. For example, my local newspaper, The (Toledo) Blade, is currently waging a campaign against the Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the University of Toledo. They cannot say anything nice about him; they report everything they can negative about him, including the ‘news’ that others have a poor opinion of him, and they endlessly repeat with every story about him the growing list of things he has done ‘wrong’. I would submit that, if you were to review ANY newspaper in this country, you would see similar biases in the coverage of local and national stories, to say nothing of the terrible biases that always get shown in reporting international news.
This is not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing. Often, the biases of a newspaper or television station result in positive changes in a community. Sometimes, the effect is even broader. The Blade last year published a comprehensive series of articles about the beryllium industry. The emphasis was on local concerns: Brush-Wellman has a couple of local plants that process the stuff, and several former employees have fallen ill with the respiratory disease that often affects those exposed to beryllium dust. No one who read the articles could conclude they were ‘fair’ or ‘unbiased’; the paper clearly thought there was a problem that was being covered-up by the industry and the government. Following the articles, many local contracting companies have begun testing programs for workers which have had to work in the beryllium plants, Brush-Wellman has increased programs designed to identify those with the disease, and the federal government has proposed a comprehensive review of diseases contracted by ALL workers in the defense industry, including beryllium handlers, plutonium handlers, etc. Thus, the biased approach of the local rag has had a positive effect, both locally and nationally. Would this have been true if they had had no strong opinion on the issue, and reported things in a ‘neutral’ way? I doubt it.
This does not mean that editorial reporting has no drawbacks. ‘Yellow’ journalism is condemned rightly. It lacked facts and often acted to spread nothing but rumors and outright lies in the attempt of the publishing magnates to influence the results of elections and governments. Since the reforming efforts of the early 1900’s, news groups have rightly concluded that ‘news’ should focus on a relatively striaghtforward reporting of ‘facts’, with opinions clearly identified as being opinions, usually limited to a specific part of the newspaper (such as the Editorial page). Efforts are made to contact both sides of a dispute for information, to avoid the appearance of outright bias. Indeed, when the parent organization of the Los Angeles Times selected as its Chairman a man who declared that revenue production and stock prices demanded a relaxation of the separation between the advertising/money-making activites and the editorial/news-reporting activities, the industry was rightfully concerned with the impact this would have on the ability of the public to accept what was reported as ‘news’ and not ‘advertisement’. But, let’s face it: when a company that reports news also owns a sports team, how ‘unbiased’ can the coverage of that team be?
Editorials are a mainstay of newspaper journalism. Newspapers understand that they have the ability to influence readers. In an attempt to separate the fact from the opinion, they put their opinions out to the public in obvious format. Failure to do so would simply make one think that the opinions are sneaking back into the facts, not through inherent biases but through intentional manipulation of the ‘news’.
This shouldn’t bother anyone much, anyway. It is a regrettable fact that, at any point in our history, there is a percentage of people who don’t care about anything, a large percentage of people who lack the intelligence, desire, or education to examine what they read/hear to formulate their own opinions, and a small percentage who do not accept what they are told, but review an issue, accept input from multiple sources, investigate issues on their own, and reach conclusions on the basis of something other than “I read in the WSJ the other day that…” The presence or lack of editorials (including election endorsements) isn’t going to change this much.