Today I’m going to address the assertion by some these days that there is a shortage of unbiased journalists.
I’m going to address it by agreeing with it. Yes, there is a shortage of unbiased journalists. But then, there always has been.
That’s because journalists, regardless of what some might argue to the contrary, are human beings. And human beings have biases.
There might be a completely unbiased journalist out there somewhere. But I can’t imagine who it would be. The journalists I’ve known and worked with all had biases. Some were just more careful to conceal them than others.
Those human biases aren’t somehow wrung out of our personalities during journalism school. Nor should they be. There are no reasons journalists should struggle to be unbiased. There are plenty of reasons for journalists to work hard to produce unbiased stories and to approach their coverage of a given issue in an unbiased way.
That’s just simple professionalism. And it’s really not that hard, despite what some non-journalists might think.
Take a newspaper story. And I’ll take it because most of my full-time journalism career was spent writing newspaper stories. It’s hard, heady work, but it isn’t particle physics. It isn’t microbiology. And it isn’t sorcery.
It’s carpentry, with words as wood. And it’s masonry with facts as bricks.
Every day as a newspaper reporter, you build something. It’s called a news story. Some days, you’ll build more than one. I had days back in state legislative sessions when I’d build five or six. So did other Capitol reporters.
Whatever your biases as a human being might be, as a professional carpenter of words and mason of bricks, you want to build something really professional. You want to build something substantial, something that lasts and stands up to the weathering effects of time.
You want what you build to be solid, set firmly on its foundation of facts, and balanced in the way those facts are collected and presented. You want plenty of reliable materials and you want them joined in an aggregate that is both appealing and strong. That way what you build won’t lean or tip one way or another under the winds of scrutiny.
I guess you could call that an unbiased story, but with a caveat, and one inspired by my old friend and news colleague Bob Mercer of Pierre.
If I recall correctly now 30 years or so after the fact, Mercer and I were in a blab session with other reporters in the press room of the South Dakota Capitol during a legislative session. I’m guessing I was more involved in the blabbing than Mercer was. I was more inclined to chat. He was more inclined to listen intently, offer the occasional slight smile and the occasional short comment, some of which were quite profound.
On that day, he had me at “the truth.”
We were talking about biases in reporters. People were sharing. People were denying. People were admitting.
Mercer finally decided to admit: “I have a bias toward the truth.”
At least, that’s the quote I remember. If he didn’t say it exactly that way, I’ll bet he won’t mind the misquote.
Mercer was talking about himself. But he could have been talking about any news story a professional journalist produces. Whatever biases we have as reporters, any bias in our stories should always be toward the truth.
That’s not as easy as it sounds, of course. Truth and facts are not always the same. Is it true that Donald Trump was good for America as president? It’s true to some people. And they can provide facts on tax cuts and economic gains and certain reductions in border crossings as proof.
Is it true that Donald Trump was bad for America as president? It’s true to some people, and probably to more people overall in this nation, given the final vote tally in the November election. And those who argue “bad for America” can provide facts on Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, failures in responding to the coronavirus and a policy of separating children from their families at the border as proof.
I’d argue that the preponderance of facts leans in favor of “bad for America” overall. And, eventually, I think that will be seen through the lens of history as the truth, based on the facts and the way they stand up over time.
Truth is precious. And we should treat it as such. That’s especially true in our work as journalists. But believing that you have an obligation as a reporter to “tell the truth” in your stories can be dangerous. That presumes that you always know the truth. Or that the truth is always easy to know and tell. It isn’t, not always. And sometimes two people can take the same set of facts and come up with a different truth, or different truths.
But facts, constructed logically and honestly, can almost always lead to the truth. So, when Mercer says he has a bias toward the truth, he’s also saying that he has a commitment to the facts. And that commitment means finding, arranging, and presenting those facts in a way that allows them to speak the truth to news consumers.
That process is simply a professional reporter doing the job, aside from any personal bias that comes quite naturally to all reporters, because we’re all human beings.
