Reporting in the Balance
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has been tracking some press coverage of the legal problems of Republican Congressmen such as Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham, along with the associated scandals. One thing he has pointed out is that the media seems to be bending over backwards to depict the story as being part of an overall political culture of corruption in which both parties are equally guilty, even when most of the federal cases right now involve Republicans. (Conversely, if you want to talk about corruption in Philadelphia, you have to focus the attention on the local Democratic Party, which has been unchallenged for a long time and shows plenty of signs of bloat.) He mentions today a Washington Post chat in which a reporter acknowledges that sometimes the effort for balance creates its own distortions.
Around the same time, Next Hurrah linked to a very good article in the NY Review of Books about how the emphasis on balance, along with corporate pressure and the overall culture of journalism, keeps the press from challenging the public with information about the powerful and the consequences of their actions. There are a number of good anecdotes in the article, many of which focus on issues like poverty and Iraq. Michael Massig strives for accuracy, but he is clearly concerned with facts that do not paint American society or government in the best of lights. I leave it to you to determine if he is being unfair or if, as Rob Corddry once joked on The Daily Show, the facts on the ground have a bias.
When it comes to the balance issue, I admit that I simultaneously see the problem and want to leap to the press’s defense. Part of that, I think, is an effort at self-defense. When I worked on the campus newspaper at Fordham, the effort to “get both sides” was one of the things that I emphasized when covering news stories. I still clearly remember one story where there was a dispute between another campus publication and the administration (via the student-run budget committee) that resulted in the publication being shut down. The narrow focus of the dispute was whether or not the publication was bringing in enough outside ad revenue to keep it going – the publications had to be somewhat but not entirely self-supporting – and whether enough of an effort was being made to increase that revenue. My reporting and writing pretty much boiled down to interviewing the two sides and presenting their alternate takes on what had happened, filling in some basic context where necessary. I felt at the time that it was the right approach because I didn’t really have the resources at hand to try and verify some of the claims about what had gone on in the past. (The budget cutbacks so many media organizations face today definitely make this a concern for reporters in the field today.) Nor did I have sources who were willing to go on the record and tell me that there was any kind of larger agenda involved – which there probably was, because the administration had long had its problems with the other publication. But I didn’t want to seem like I was gloating over a rival publication’s troubles or trying to kick the administration, so that whole balance thing was definitely in my head when I wrote the article.
I actually just now pulled my copy of that year’s paper off my shelf and reread it. In the narrow context of events, I actually think the strive-for-balance approach worked. The various sides had different perspectives on what was fair and appropriate, and a lot of basic facts weren’t really in dispute. It was more a question of how to interpret them – was the administration/committee being ham-handed or unrealistic in its demands, or was the publication failing to live up to its obligations? So presenting the sides wasn’t a bad thing to do. On the other hand, I did nothing to establish the larger context of the administration’s feud with the publication and raise the question of whether this was some kind of payback. Student leaders at Fordham were a fairly incestuous group – one of the leaders of student government was my editor-in-chief the year after this story ran, and she worked on or ran several other organizations as well. (No way to avoid that, because there were far more positions than people who wanted to fill them.) But as a result we heard plenty of rumors about “what was really going on” – but no one was willing to say anything on the record. Which brings us back to the issue of sources and why cultivating them is so important if reporting is to have any credibility. That cultivation sometimes results in compromises being made and reporters having to sit on information that they have but can’t source or prove. That’s part of the territory, but the sources have to be put to good use rather than being accumulated for their own sake.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.
Thursday, December 8th 2005 at 12:49 am |
I live in the trenches on the issue of bias, balance and credibility, and one thing you have to get used to, pronto, is that you’ll never satisfy everybody. Never. You can be as balanced as you like and someone still thinks you’re hiding something, or covering someone else’s backside. Now, usually, that someone will wind up being one, or one of a handful of similar specimens of, frequent-caller loudmouth conspiracy theorists who are honked off that their own agendas and interests aren’t being served.
Often, I find the biggest conflict comes from “public sources” – law enforcement, local government, or any level of government for that matter – who, for obvious reasons of future reporting, you do not want to get honked off at you. And yet sometimes you have to blow their cover on stuff if they’ve suddenly become the story themselves.
High school and college journalism all makes this stuff look way too easy. I’ve known people who busted their butts, got the degree, and then a couple of years into real reporting, said “I don’t want to be doing this anymore.” I’m sure that the almost irreconcilable mish mash of Other People’s Agendas vs. what once seemed like a simple case of Just Telling The Truth has a lot to do with that.
Of course, I bugged out of real journalism early and slid into promotions, where all I have to worry about is not getting sued, so I suppose it’s easy for me to say.