6 May 2007 - 6:48pm
Lesley Stahl doesn't understand "fair and balanced" -- does anybody in the news media?
I'm not at all a fan of Lou Dobbs, but I was quite shocked to see Lesley Stahl get up on her high horse, criticizing Dobbs for not being "fair and balanced."
"Reporters don't 'take on' issues. Reporters 'report' issues, and there’s a big difference there," Stahl says. "Do you think you're a journalist?"
It sounds like, in this case, at least, Stahl has her own "take," doesn't it?
"I'm sitting here saying to myself, 'This man runs a news show? … And you can just tell me you don’t like the president. Woo," Stahl remarks.
"I, matter of fact, insist that the audience know where I come from," Dobbs says.
"What about fair and balanced?" Stahl asks.
"I've never, Lesley, found the truth to be fair and balanced. I’ve found it to be…," Dobbs remarks.
"But, that’s, but wait, what’s the definition of 'journalism?' That that’s in there. That has to be part of what a journalist is, is fair and balanced," Stahl remarks.
What is this "fair and balanced" stuff, anyway? Going by what we've seen in the mainstream media over the past two or three decades, it means not doing any fact checking.
If George W. Bush were to start claiming that the sun rises in the west, we would see the media treat the topic as a "controversial" issue. The only "fair and balanced" approach would be to let the monkeys screech and jump up and down -- "The sun rises is the west!" "No, the sun rises in the east!" The "fair and balanced" approach would not include any sort of determination whether the sun does in deed rise in the west.
No. That would be bias.
This is how we ended up in Iraq. The mainstream media wanted to be "fair and balanced" and so they just took dictation of what other people said.
That is reporting today. And judging by Lesley Stahl's performance tonight on 60 Minutes, they're still pretty damned proud of themselves.
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Comments
I think many American reporters do not understand what objective means. Possibly the ranks of writing (or talking heads) are filled with too many people who do well when filling in bubbles, but not so well when thinking.
If you are on the street and you see a 200 pound man beating punching a 5 year old child in the face, walking away from that and not commenting on that as being wrong is not being objective, but by the definition of what the average American reporter thinks fair and balanced or objective means it completely would.
I think that's a problem. I think it's a big problem when the average reporter seems to use the definition of the prime directive from the TV series Star Trek as the guide as to what is and what is not fair.
Lo Fleming
Objective indeed!