The Myth of Journalistic Ethics and Neutrality

[j.c]

Go, Barbarian, go! Terrific analogy, too.

But hey, Istara and Wake up call - your posts are undermining any arguements others have made about journalistic ethics.

[Malthus]

*Originally posted by Dogface *
**What infuriates me is the way that journalists, who at least theoretically have some training in the social sciences, can actually believe that they can even BE unbiased. We all have bias. It is not possible to act without having bias. I have never, not once in my life, encountered any press outlet in any medium that is fair and unbiased. They are ALL biased. That doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is the hypocrisy and self-delusion that they wallow in when they claim that they are “unbiased”.

Indeed, I use that as a yardstick to determine how dishonest a media outlet is. The more it brags about being “even”, “fair”, or “unbiased”, the more I presume that it is biased, unfair, and self-delusional. **

Maybe it is impossible to be unbiased.

But it is certainly possible to strive to be unbiased.

The attempt to be “even”, “fair” and “unbiased” has value, in my opinion, even if the actual achievement of these states may not be possible for fallible humans.

[Jackmannii]

By the way:

*Originally posted by RexDart *
**We often hear from journalists that they are held to (italics added) standards and ethics. **

Who’s claiming this?

[ElJeffe]

Astorian:

look, Carl Bernstein’s hatred of Richard Nixon may be what drove him to pursue the Watergate story so doggedly, but he got the story right, so what do his motives or “biases” really matter?

I would say it should matter, to most people. If I know nothing about Reporter Bob except that he absolutely detests Politician Joe, and Reporter Bob puts out a scathing piece on Joe, how do I know that this piece is fair and accurate? Bob certainly has a vested interest in seeing Joe out of office. Unless I have previous experience with Bob’s work, and know him to be fair even when he has very strong views on a subject, I’m going to assume that there’s more to his story than meets the eye.

“It’s not my job to be fair. It’s my job to be accurate. If what I write is factually correct, I’ve done my job, and I really don’t care if conservatives think I’m being fair or unbiased.”

And this I disagree with quite strongly. I could write a completely accurate story on any given person that made them out to be as awful as I pleased. You just need to quote them out of context, and refuse to give the whole story. If Politician Joe passes a bill that helps out 100 people, and seriously screws 1000, yet I only mention the 100 benificiaries, then I’ve been truthful and accurate, correct? Yet it’s still a biased account, and it’s misleading as hell.

In general, I agree that neutrality is good, up to a certain point. But I think that there are some cases where a little emotional content isn’t a bad thing. If someone finds the body of a little girl that’s been mutilated and raped, I wouldn’t at all mind seeing the crime described as “heinous”. Certainly, that word colors the situation, and ascribes a sense of right and wrong, but so what? Anyone who disagrees that such a crime is “heinous” I wouldn’t want to associate with. We know that Saddam is an evil bastard. Seeing what he does described as “atrocities” doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Of course, calling a bill pending vote in Congress “heinous” is crossing the line, unless you’re clearly writing editorial.

Of course, bias in reporting is typically more subtle than that. It can be as simple as referring to a proposal as a “scheme”, or a well-placed usage of the word “so-called”. This is the type of reporting more likely to influence, and it’s a type that reporters (goo ones, anyway) should be wary of.
Jeff