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...only peripherally political.
I was musing on this after watching the news. To me, "fair and balanced reporting" is to look at what is said and done, ascertain the facts, and put those facts out there with as little spin as possible (some spin, yes, is inevitable, just by the choice of words). Fair and balanced reporting is saying, without hedging, that "You, sir or madam, said X, but that's contradicted by This and That fact, which indicate that Y is actually the case. How do you answer that?" The relationship between the press and the government is supposed to be adversarial: the press is supposed to be the watchdog that keeps people from abusing power and calls them on their spin, their lies, and their inconsistencies.
That's not what I see on any of the main news channels. Instead, now what passes for "fair and balanced reporting" is noting that This Person Said (or Did) That, then having two talking heads, once from either side, contradict each other and give a full-spin account based on their agendas. There's no fact-checking, there's no dialog, there's no calling of someone for giving flat-out misinformation.
And it's all I ever see on CNN or MSNBC or ABC, NBC, and CBS.
You're not 'reporting' if you're just allowing the two sides to give their account of the situation without commentary or input. You're reporting if you dig for the facts, give those facts to the people, and let them draw their own conclusions. You're reporting if when someone says "I did X" you stop them in the middle of their pre-fabricated sound bite and say, "No, that's not true. Actually, you did Y, and here's where I found that information."
So where is that kind of reporting? Did it ever exist? It's certainly not on the cable/broadcast 'news.' There are scraps of it on the internet (factcheck.org comes to mind for at least trying to determine the truth of political claims), but mostly, it seems to be missing.
I want my adversarial media back. Where are the Brits when you need them?
I was musing on this after watching the news. To me, "fair and balanced reporting" is to look at what is said and done, ascertain the facts, and put those facts out there with as little spin as possible (some spin, yes, is inevitable, just by the choice of words). Fair and balanced reporting is saying, without hedging, that "You, sir or madam, said X, but that's contradicted by This and That fact, which indicate that Y is actually the case. How do you answer that?" The relationship between the press and the government is supposed to be adversarial: the press is supposed to be the watchdog that keeps people from abusing power and calls them on their spin, their lies, and their inconsistencies.
That's not what I see on any of the main news channels. Instead, now what passes for "fair and balanced reporting" is noting that This Person Said (or Did) That, then having two talking heads, once from either side, contradict each other and give a full-spin account based on their agendas. There's no fact-checking, there's no dialog, there's no calling of someone for giving flat-out misinformation.
And it's all I ever see on CNN or MSNBC or ABC, NBC, and CBS.
You're not 'reporting' if you're just allowing the two sides to give their account of the situation without commentary or input. You're reporting if you dig for the facts, give those facts to the people, and let them draw their own conclusions. You're reporting if when someone says "I did X" you stop them in the middle of their pre-fabricated sound bite and say, "No, that's not true. Actually, you did Y, and here's where I found that information."
So where is that kind of reporting? Did it ever exist? It's certainly not on the cable/broadcast 'news.' There are scraps of it on the internet (factcheck.org comes to mind for at least trying to determine the truth of political claims), but mostly, it seems to be missing.
I want my adversarial media back. Where are the Brits when you need them?