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Unbiased journalism is not pretending both sides are equally valid. Unbiased journalism is reporting the facts even if those facts include that one side is irredeemably awful. False neutrality is propaganda.
Repeated for emphasis: False neutrality is propaganda.
if 99 experts say one thing, and 1 expert says another, presenting both sides as equal is misinformation
Years ago I went to a lecture by a science journalist, who talked about why so much science reporting is terrible, and this was the crux of his argument. Science reporters aren’t scientists, so they try to be “unbiased” and end up validating bad science in the interest of “giving both sides of the story.”
But this is no longer just a problem for science journalists. When the media doesn’t take a stand on what is factual, or at least supported by evidence, it contributes to its own implosion and the destruction of critical thought and democracy. I am not even joking here. False “let’s heard from both sides” neutrality contributes to the idea that there are no facts, only different kinds of spin.
Alice Allison Dunnigan grew up on a red-clay hill in Logan County, the daughter of a poor sharecropper and a washerwoman.
She, too, would wash clothes and clean houses for white people before working her way through Kentucky State University to realize her first big dream, becoming a school teacher.
But Dunnigan is remembered today for climbing another hill — Capitol Hill — where in the late 1940s she became the first black woman journalist accredited to Congress, the White House and other major assignments in Washington, D.C.
Dunnigan died in 1983 at age 77, but Carol McCabe Booker, a former journalist and lawyer, remembers meeting her once at a party. Dunnigan was a friend of Booker’s husband, Simeon, 96, another pioneering black journalist.
I’ve seen a lot of posts on my dash lately about people wanting to help, trying to figure out what they can do that might make a difference. If you’re worried about freedom of the press, I would suggest a donation to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Legal Defense Fund. They’re the ones who fight for journalists’ legal rights, especially when it comes to reporting stories that someone somewhere may not want the public to know.
So, yes, showing your support for press freedom by offering SPJ some financial support is one way to make a difference. Here’s another, and it’s fairly inexpensive*:
Actually read news stories. Not just the often-sensational click-bait headlines.
Too many news aggregate sites – not to mention that kind of weird second cousin whom you have to friend on Facebook for the sake of family harmony – find a story from a legitimate news source, slap a sensational (or flat-out inaccurate) headline on it and use it as click bait. This often results in people reading the click-bait headline and thinking they know the story. But such a headline may, at best, distort the truth a bit and, at worst, flat out get it wrong.
Legitimate** journalists too often find the facts in their legitimate stories overwhelmed by the more colorful not-facts in the click-bait versions. Some of them end up having to defend their stories and/or the accuracy of their reporting on their own social media accounts. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
If Woodward & Bernstein were to come up with Watergate today, how quickly would Nixon’s social media people start a Twitter flame war to discredit them and overshadow the real story? Nixon might not emerge completely untarnished, but he also might survive based purely on the court of public opinion thinking his social media team’s tweets were funny.
That’s a scary thing for journalists. Along with fighting for ad revenue (which is what pays a newspaper’s bills and reporters’ salaries) in a world where everyone thinks Facebook and Twitter are all the advertising they need, real journalists also have to try to combat people deciding that they don’t need to pay attention to legitimate newspapers and news sites because the click-bait headlines are more fun. That’s more dangerous than the lack of ad revenue.
I’m not going to give you a list of “legitimate” news sources. But if your community has a newspaper, read it. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s not. Reading critically can help you decide which type it is. Interact with it. Discuss its stories with friends. Write letters to the editor. If you know of something that might be a story – they aren’t all Watergate – tell someone at the paper.
* If you can’t afford a subscription, visit a public library and read it there.
** It can be hard to tell a legitimate journalist from a fake one, but it’s worth the effort to try. (I have a friend – yes, we’re both American – who finds it helpful to listen to BBC News for a different perspective on world events, including those in the U.S.)
