Fair And Balanced?
You might be thinking that a 100-percent objective approach – a safe way to avoid upsetting a particular candidate’s flock – might be allocating a guaranteed block of time to every legitimate candidate. They’d get, say, five minutes, regardless of how active or newsworthy the politicking was that week, or what polls were saying about a candidate’s viability.
This would be a recipe for televised disaster. Today you’d need at least an hour-long show, once a week, just to give each candidate five minutes. It would also force reporters and editors to inflate an unchanged campaign, with no new or significant speeches, policy papers or town-hall meetings, just to fill a prescribed time slot.
Phony fairness and balance could lead to false equivalencies. Audiences would likely also ask for equal treatment for their candidates. For example, if a news show accurately revealed a big lie by Candidate A, blind fairness could dictate that reporters find something negative to say about Candidate B, even if it is nowhere near as significant as the lie from Candidate A.
I preach that objectivity is a mythical standard in journalism. We often pound our chests and promise objectivity to our audiences, even though it’s something few people believe we actually deliver.
Journalists are humans and we all make subjective decisions every day. We’re subjective when we choose the words to describe something or someone. Editors are subjective in deciding what news you’ll see or hear, and how much space or time will be devoted to a story. Meanwhile, individual viewers or readers use their own subjectivity and bias to decide what news they’ll ultimately believe.
Is NewsHour Unfair to Bernie?
Instead of asking if a journalist is objective, we should demand that the news be demonstrably accurate and fair.
So, the questions stand: Is the PBS NewsHour portraying the Sanders campaign accurately? The record shows that it is. Was it unfair to leave him out of this one episode of Politics Monday? OK, maybe. NewsHour reporters and producers could have probably found a way to legitimately talk a bit about Sanders in the 13 minutes of Politics Monday without harming the segment’s flow. But they shouldn’t be sent to the stockades for skipping him this time.
What I took away from this Bernie brouhaha is the impressive level of enthusiasm among his supporters. I don’t yet see the same behind the other candidates. His people truly feel the Bern. That alone is good copy for any reporter.