Tuesday evening our Socrates Café met at the Mayfield Road Phoenix Coffee House and the question we pulled from the box was:

What does it mean for the media to provide balanced coverage?

My initial reaction was that the concept of balanced coverage was a chimera, a serious bit of smoke and mirrors created by the broadcast media to hide the reality that as long as humans are involved in selecting the stories, who gets to answer questions, how much time they are given to state their views and what images are chosen to accompany a story, there can be no balance; humans are by our very nature biased. We can’t help that fact.

In the past, before broadcast media, the fairness doctrine and licensing of the public airwaves, journalists made no attempt to present themselves as fair and balanced. Newspapers were blatantly associated with particular politics and ideologies. Generally people subscribed to those publications that supported their personal view of the world: Republicans read Republican newspapers, Socialists read socialist newspapers, etc.

Others gathered around the table at the Mayfield Road Phoenix Coffee House wanted to believe it was possible for journalists to be balanced, or at least neutral and to report simply the facts without prejudice.

To a journalist the facts are encompassed in the who, what, where, when, why and how of the story. I assert that the first four are in and of themselves, not news. It is the why and how of a story that is news.

Take the following as an example.

Mr. John Smith was arrested in Cleveland Heights yesterday.

Accept for a moment that that is the entirely of the story, is it neutral and unbiased?

No. Unless it is the practice of the reporting entity to report, in its entirety, the police blotter (and some newspapers do this) then an editorial decision was made that the arrest of John Smith, for whatever reason, was important enough among all other police actions yesterday to justify being reported. That is a bias.

Now take the first word in the story, the title. If the story reads:

Miss Sally Smith was arrested in Cleveland Heights yesterday.

The story is markedly different because a reader interprets what the title Miss. means. Change that to Mrs. or even Ms. and it changes again.

Change a bit again to:

Ms. Sally Smith was arrested in Cleveland Heights at 3 a.m. yesterday.

And the story changes yet again. All aspects of the story remain factual, yet can you see the bias creeping in?

Readers assume that facts introduced to a story must be pertinent, else why would the reporter put them there. If the reporter tells the reader that Sally Smith was arrested on the Cleveland Heights/East Cleveland border, the story takes on an additional twist. And still it is all perfectly factual.

A savvy reader understands that the information delivered is always, always filtered through the experiences of the person writing the story and the person, or persons, editing the story. Throw in a third set of experiences in the form of the person writing the headline and you get yet another story.

Take the case of ABC New’s correspondent Brian Ross’ cooking of the Nidal Malik Hasan story.

The bias can be resisted, it can be hidden, it can even be hidden, but it can never be removed.

Intelligent adults simply need to accept that, make it a part of the bullshit meter and deal.

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