Unfair and Unbalanced

 

Friend Xerxes laments the decline in journalistic ethics since the dawn of Fox News and talk radio. We are now increasingly vulnerable to “misinformation.”

But the problem with journalistic ethics does not start with Fox News. The original slogans of Fox News were “Fair and balanced,” and “We report—you decide.” They obviously resonated with the public; Fox rocketed to news dominance. Clearly, there was already a public perception that the media were biased. Fox was the antidote.

Fox has dropped these slogans, as more of its schedule has been taken up by commentary. But commentary is not supposed to be neutral—the opinion is why you watch. Xerxes is similarly wrong to accuse “talk radio” of bias. The shows we call “talk radio” are opinion shows, not news. The news side is still, at Fox, pretty unbiased. The same cannot be said of the “legacy media.”

News outlets must decide what to report. The legacy media tend not to report anything they don’t like politically. Even back in the 1980’s, I noticed that whenever the Toronto Star ran a report of a murder, and the suspect was not “white,” no race was mentioned. If, on the other hand, it was a “Caucasian male,” that was always reported.

I recall a few years ago, a pro-life demonstration in Washington that set new records for attendance. It was not reported anywhere I could find in the legacy media. 

The “Freedom Convoy” seemed to most of us to come out of the blue—because the media was not reporting on it as it gathered.

The bias is worse than this. 

In journalism school, you are told that, whenever you report on a controversy, you quote prominent spokespeople on both sides of the issue.

The legacy media almost never to do this anymore. You never hear two sides on issues like the climate debate, or the efficacy of ivermectin for covid, or the efficacy of wearing masks, or the possible risks of the vaccines, or anything involving Donald Trump, and so on. An obvious breach of ethics.

In journalism school, you are also told to check every fact with three independent sources. Legacy media never seems to check a fact any more if it supports the “narrative.” Things are published as fact that a simply Google search could disprove. It is charity to see this as mere negligence. One example: the Covington kids.

An egregious current example: media always refer to the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa as an “illegal occupation.” I even saw an anchor correct an interviewee who referred to it only as a protest.

In fact, whether it was illegal has not yet been determined in court. 

Properly speaking, the media should probably be sued for this. Perhaps, in the fallout, if it is ruled to have been legal, they will be.