Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Journalistic Bias

10/2/2017

7 Comments

 
Everyone has bias. Journalistic objectivity is easy to confuse with offering personal views in a neutral tone of voice, or giving equal time/space to each side of an issue. Flat earth and round earth, five minutes each.

According to the American Press Institute, the late-19th-century ideal of “realism” held that truth would emerge when reporters presented the facts. But honest intentions can’t erase personal bias. During the Russian Revolution, journalist Walter Lippmann said reporters saw what they wanted to see. True objectivity lies not in the person but the method.

Kovach and Rosenstiel advocate three core principles for verification: transparency (name your source, tell how you reached your conclusions), humility (keep an open mind, don’t assume), and originality (do your own work, check your sources).

Former Washington Post correspondent Paul Taylor said he used to write the lead before he began work on a story, then compare it to the lead after he finished. If they were too similar, he hadn’t looked far enough beyond his preconceptions. He had more work to do. 
7 Comments
Lisa
10/2/2017 08:26:50 am

In the late 19th century, my small town of Evansville had no fewer than three papers at one time, each with its own opinion. Maybe what we consider to be a very new problem — that of people not looking very far for their news — has its roots in a much earlier time, when the other two papers in Evansville and all the other small towns folded and we were left with only one local voice.

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Sarah link
10/2/2017 10:01:54 am

Lisa, that's an interesting possibility. I've wondered the opposite: whether we have so many options now (fewer newspapers, but loads of cable channels, radio stations, and websites) that we can select only the news sources that match our biases.

In my home town of Morgantown WV in my childhood we had two newspapers, the morning Dominion News and the afternoon Morgantown Post, with opposing editorial pages but the same content otherwise and the same ownership. Like in Evansville and presumably for the same reasons, now there's only one.

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Lisa Imhoff
10/2/2017 10:12:03 am

Well, statistically we have a lot of options on where to get our news, as in your first paragraph. But, statistically, most people only get their news these days from links on Facebook.

I think it's the reader who doesn't look far beyond his preconceptions! Thereby, yes, choosing news to match our bias.

I think true objectivity does not exist. That's not a complaint about society or journalists. It's a fact of filters.

Sarah link
10/2/2017 11:06:33 am

A history seminar professor at Oberlin told us about the 19th century German historians' ideal of letting the facts speak for themselves. He argued that facts can never speak for themselves. Facts don't speak. Someone must always choose which facts to present and how to arrange them.

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Lisa Imhoff
10/2/2017 11:12:05 am

So true, in both non-fiction and fiction. :)

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Walter Hassenpflug
10/4/2017 12:38:43 pm

I shared the same hometown as Sara. Two newspapers. Some locals stated that one paper was more Republican and that the other was more Democrat. Yes, later the two papers became simply one paper, still owned by a family that is very much Republican today.

In a journalism class at the local university, the professor presented a case where the teacher and a couple of selected students rigged a shooting event in the classroom. One student was the hooded "shooter" who entered the classroom and opened fire, hitting only only student (the other selected student) who fell "dead" with ketchup splattered all over his chest. Quickly the "shooter" ran out of the classroom. The students were immediately interviewed about the "shooting."
Was the shooter male or female. How tall, what size? How, what, why, when and the usual interrogatives. The answers were as varied as the number of students in the classroom. Where was the truth? So many interpretations of the "truth." Where was the truth? Where was the truth?

We are humans who have so many different perspectives and opinions of the same events in life.

The family of the two newspapers which combined into one, was extremely wealthy because of its holdings in other areas beyond the newspaper. One family member ran a few times for public office but lost by large margins because voters perceived him as to rich to know the needs of the common person. Perceptions sometimes are flawed. Perception is sometimes more important than actual truth.

Just some of my immediate thoughts. Sometimes truth is not important.

Sarah, once again you have stimulated our brains.

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Sarah link
10/4/2017 04:06:33 pm

Walter, thanks for the reminders about the Morgantown papers and the family who owned them. Greers of Greer Limestone, right? I didn't know (or didn't remember) that one ran for office. The needs of the common person may be another area where perception carries more weight than fact.

I love the story of the WVU journalism class where students wrote accounts of the staged shooting. My same history professor who insisted facts can't speak for themselves had been in the US Navy during the Korean War. They were in a sea battle. As ship's historian, he was charged with writing it up the day after the battle. Everyone he interviewed about it might have been in a different battle, their accounts were so different. He was warning us against assuming that just because we have an eye-witness primary source account of something, we have "the" truth of the event. If only one person present wrote about it, theirs will be the perception that goes down as documented history.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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