Journalism’s Slippery Slope

This piece: It’s time to admit that journalists are human beings is part candor and part slippery slope.

“In the wake of the sanctioning of a public-radio host for being involved in an Occupy Wall Street protest, former Slate media critic Jack Shafer says that media outlets should stop trying to force their journalists to pretend that they are soul-less robots without opinions….”

There’s a short step between this sort of “recognition” and the policy of sanctioning deliberately biased reporting.

It is true that “objective journalism” has always been a goal and never a reality. It can’t be reality because every journalist has opinions.

However, allowing those opinions to seep into coverage, to spin the news is what give us  increasingly NON-credible coverage, especially on television … as typified by CNBC and Fox News who serve less as legitimate news outlets and more as cheerleaders for the Left and the Right. They are not alone.

Having been a journalist for more than  40 years — including stints covering Congress and the White House and a bit of time reaching journalism at Cornell and UCLA, I see the unbridled rise of unacceptably biased news, from out-right partisan wording to nuanced word choices that can bias a reader or viewer one way or another.

Those word choices and larger biased decisions on who to cover and who to pillory are unacceptable and violate the responsibilities of a free press — and that includes bloggers.

Conscious bias is outright unethical.

Unconscious bias is inexcusable and arises from laziness or the lack of awareness that  journalists have a duty to look for their bias, recognize it and do their best to eliminate.

That doesn’t mean that there is no room for opinions. We all have them. Editorials and columns are a time-honored way to express those. But those need to be clearly recognizable as opinion. Burying opinion in a news article or deliberately leaving out opposing views or facts in order to skew the outcome of an article is just sleazy.

The journalist who consciously writes to support a cause is not a journalist at all, but a shill and unworthy of reading, viewing or listening to.