I don’t mean to be flip here. The charge of bias is a common complaint from consumers of news online, on television and in print. It deserves to be addressed. Most often, as with reader Bain, the charge is that the media is extremely liberal and they no longer bother to try and hide it. But frequently, the accusation is just the opposite. Reader Philip G. Allen wrote the other day that he is appalled at the transparency of MSNBCs fascist leanings.
Beyond the diatribe
The charge of bias, or a lack of objectivity, is a recurring theme in reader e-mail. But beyond accusations, what does bias mean?
The problem is that much of this mail provides so little beyond the accusation that it leaves small room for any kind of discussion. The charges become a subtler version of the When did you stop beating your wife? challenge. (I should note that Mr. Allen did elaborate, objecting specifically to what he characterized as MSNBC.coms pimping for the Republican Party while being silent on the theft of the presidency by the lunatic fringe of the extreme far-right fascists.)
In my experience, conversations among journalists about objectivity often stall as well for a lack of fresh perspective. Thats why I found the work of the Washington-based Committee of Concerned Journalists (CCJ) and specifically two of its co-founders, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, to be refreshing and, I hope, of value to news consumers as well as news providers in providing food for thought on the topic. I learned about their efforts at a workshop for MSNBC.com staff members one of a series that Kovach and Rosenstiel have been putting on at news organizations across the country.
(CCJ Chairman Kovach is a 40-year veteran journalist, who has served, among other positions, as Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and curator of the Neiman foundation. Vice Chairman Rosenstiel includes on his resume a stint as chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek and 12 years as a media critic for the Los Angeles Times. The two also co-authored The Elements of Journalism: What News People Should Know and the Public Should Expect, a book growing out of the same research on which much of their workshop is based.)
Value of transparency
“Our method must be objective since journalists themselves can never be.”
Bill Kovach, Committee of Concerned Journalists
Kovach and Rosenstiel contend that the whole notion of journalistic objectivity is misunderstood. When the concept originally evolved, it was not meant to imply that journalists were free of bias, they say. Quite the contrary. The term began to appear as part of journalism after the turn of the century, particularly in the 1920s, out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information a transparent approach to evidence precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work. Or, as Kovach summed it up: Our method must be objective since journalists themselves can never be.
The question for journalists, the CCJ founders said, is: How do you sift through the rumor, gossip, failed memory, manipulative agendas, the limits of ones own perception and come to an account people will recognize as reliable? The answer, they added, lies in what they term the discipline of verificationBy whatever name, it is what separates journalism from other forms of communication from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art. Entertainment and its cousin infotainment focus on what is most diverting. Propaganda will select facts or invent them to serve the real purpose persuasion and manipulation. Fiction invests scenarios to get at a more personal impression of what it calls truth. Journalism alone is focused first on getting what happened down right.
The discipline of verification
How do you know what you know? Who are your sources? How direct is their knowledge? What biases might they have? Are there conflicting accounts? What dont we know?
They suggested several touchstones for this discipline of verification. Based on my own experience as a reporter and editor and particularly those stories that I wish I had handled better than I did I thought two were particularly pertinent:
Be as transparent as possible about your reporting methods and motivesThe only way in practice to level with people about what you know is to reveal as much as possible about sources and methods. How do you know what you know? Who are your sources? How direct is their knowledge? What biases might they have? Are there conflicting accounts? What dont we know?
Keep an open mindJournalists should not only be skeptical of what they see and hear, but also their ability to know what it really means. In other words, journalists need to recognize their own fallibility, the limitations of their knowledge. They should avoid false omniscience. They should acknowledge to themselves what they are unsure of, or only think they understand and then check it out.
Recognizing bias
In my opinion, what makes it particularly tough for both journalists and readers in trying to address this issue is that as human beings, we are a lot quicker to recognize bias in the other guy than we are to see it in ourselves.
Unless youre a reader who subscribes to the notion that there is some giant media conspiracy to mislead, or a journalist who thinks that readers are just too parochial to understand, however, I propose that the CCJ perspective offers some fertile ground for an exchange. Im sure Ill be writing more about the issue based in part on your feedback to this column. Meanwhile, you can learn more about Kovach, Rosenstiel, and the committees work at the CCJ
