but when there are two factions and the facts do favor one, or the preponderance of X (whatever X is) lies on one side, how can the reporter go about conveying this info to the reader in a fair and balanced way?
What is balance? if you are not balanced, can you still be fair?
presumably "balance" does not mean positioning the viewpoint of the story equidistant between said factions? or does it? if it does, doesn't accuracy (in mirroring the world) suffer?
is "contextual objectivity" ("an attempt to reflect all sides of any story while retaining the values, beliefs and sentiments of the target audience") the de facto meaning of Balance in the U.S. media as it is for Al Jazeera? (other Al Jazeera articles here)
those are my questions, & here are some writings that resonate with what I see as reality:
The media is failing if it does not educate its readership on the facts
on journalism, objectivity and bias:
The difference between fact and opinion is not a bright line: It is a spectrum. At one end you have "2 + 2 = 4," and on the other you have "Social Security should be privatized"
Tied up in balancing:
What we in the media are concerned about are allegations of bias or imbalance. Fairness is all, but the attaining of a position of perfect balance between two positions on an issue is something else entirely. The pursuit of balance has lead to vast slabs of inadequate copy that can be characterised as "he said-she said" journalism.
This holds that the story is adequately handled if you go first to one side then the other and line the comments up side by side. What might be said might be highly misleading or completely untrue or just meaningless drivel but who cares - journalism is about collecting and collating opposing comments.
There are a myriad of difficulties with this approach. Who said there is only two points of view to most issues? [If it's] a Tweedledee and Tweedledum affair of two sides equally and mutually scared of upsetting the same bunch of horses, the comments can usually be predicted pretty perfectly and won't amount to much anyway. The usual suspects for comment will be those with their hands up, and those least likely to have anything new, different or challenging to say.
The alternative view is that the story is not done, unless you are telling the punter what is really going on. Simply collecting and collating the he saids and she saids won't do that, but requiring comments to be meaningful and challenging those that are untruthful might. This usually implies going to he and she for their comments after a bit of basic digging into the story, rather than going there first and only there.
what ails journalism:
Some critics charge that objectivity is illusory to start with since journalists inevitably control the sources (or, as is sometimes the case, sources control the journalists). Others feel that the objectivity mindset leads to point-counterpoint or he said/she said formulas of news reporting that ultimately have a paralyzing effect on the public. So long as journalists see themselves as detached, value-neutral observers, news becomes a mere recital of context-free information -- often irrelevant, often misleading.
On balance as equidistance:
You [reporters] think you've covered a story when you put yourself equidistant between two groups and then you don't have to evaluate who's telling the truth or what their records are." -- Jeff Cohen
objectivity:
Patty Calhoun: "I think it's more important that we pursue the truth, and I think that's what we're doing. By saying objectivity isn't out there, what we're saying is you cannot, bottom line, be objective because you're going to go in with certain biases. You're going to go in and say I'm a white woman without a girdle who's writing a story. I'm writing it differently than a white woman in a girdle on a daily newspaper might be. Those biases are there and that's going to rule out objectivity, but you can certainly pursue accuracy and fairness and the truth, and that pursuit continues."
Kim Elton:
Michael Kinsley, a journalist, once noted that if a politician declares that two plus two is five, reporters might note in the story that the position is not without some critics. Indeed, he added, journalists probably would quote another politician in the opposite party saying the sum should be four. They might even quote a third politician suggesting there is a possible compromise between the advocates of `five' and the advocates of`four'.
By strict journalism standards the story headlined "Politicians battle over sums" would be balanced if all three politicians are quoted. But readers who don't know what the sum really is or how math really works will have to guess at the truth and may go for the most facile quote.
Reporting that reflects reality instead of `spin' too often is limited by the radical agnosticism in the media that refuses to classify any quote as untrue...
Deni Elliott (in a much more general and wide ranging article):
If a statement known to be false is worth publication, news organizations should help their readers understand that the statement ought not to be believed. The era in which news organizations could claim that they ought not be accountable for knowingly printing falsehoods disappeared in the 1950s coverage of Senator Joe McCarthy and his unchallenged claims of communists in our midst.
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