Having been a working journalist for nearly 30 years and having taught journalism at the college level for nine, I think a lot about bias.
It’s true that, at least in the eyes of many Americans, the media do not cover many stories the way the complainant thinks they should. In every election we hear accusations that this angle or that wasn’t covered, that the media ignored some critical story that could have made a difference in the election.
Bias in news coverage is something that greatly concerns me. We try very hard in our newsroom to be as fair as possible in our news coverage of local events and issues. That doesn’t mean we can cover every event or every sport the way every reader wants us to, but we want to do the best we can with the time and man-hours we have available, and we don’t want to write stories in a particular way to forward some secret agenda we have. We’re very careful about that.
Lack of objectivity in editorials is another story. The opinion page is going to display a particular viewpoint because that’s what opinion is. An editorial or column is simply someone’s subjective perspective on an issue.
As you can see from the spirited responses across the page to our editorial of last week, which expressed concerns about how things are going to go under the new Congress and Administration, not everybody agreed with us.
An editorial, as I’ve explained before, is simply the group-think of the editorial board of a newspaper. Traditionally, they are unsigned if they are representing the opinion of more than one person. In some newspapers, though, such as the Albany Democrat-Herald, editorials often bear the initials of the person who wrote them.
An editorial is not supposed to be objective, though we want our opinions to be logical and fair. Red herrings, non sequitors, ad hominem conclusions and other logical fallacies are easy to fall into but really don’t make for good arguments, even if talk radio shows are full of them.
If you disagree with an argument or opinion you see in these pages, write a response. Unless a letter runs afoul of the conditions spelled out in the box below (personal attacks, excessive duplication, etc.), it will run if I receive it.
However, though most of us write because we’re upset, we’d probably agree that excessive angry venting doesn’t lend itself to arguments likely to change someone’s mind and basically just leads to bad blood. We’d want to keep things civil, at least.
Along a similar line, allow me to make one more observation.
Over the years, at various newspapers, I’ve heard threats from angry readers to cancel their subscriptions due to something they’ve read in the paper – in every case in the opinion pages. As you can see on the facing page, some of our readers have considered that option after reading last week’s editorial.
I’ve had very close acquaintances who actually have done this and I wasn’t sure then and I’m not sure now what, exactly, they were trying to accomplish.
Yes, by cancelling their subscription they no longer had to read those pesky editorial viewpoints and look at those objectionable cartoons. But a newspaper is a lot like a grocery store in that it contains a lot of different content. When you go to the grocery store, you don’t buy everything there. You take what you want and leave the rest.
I’ve subscribed to many newspapers whose stances on the opinion pages differed from my views. I’ve even worked for some.But as long as I didn’t see those editorial viewpoints spilling over into how they covered the local news, I kept reading.
If they did, then that would be a really good reason to quit.