Maybe fair and unbalanced is better … but with a few reservations

 

In London, A Case Study In Opinionated Press

                                       
NPR reporting on biased news sources as a way of life in Britain.

Do we have an unreasonable expectation or definition of what our sources of trusted news ought to be. Next question then is how do we define the word “trusted” as in “trusted news source.”

For years now most liberals have experienced something between outrage and absolute contempt for the broadcasting emitting from Fox News framed by Fox’s notorious “fair and balanced” slogan.

However, after years of ignoring Fox News broadcasts, mocking the pretended fair and balanced notion and angrily ranting when the new bias drifts over into outright deception and lying, perhaps the polarizing issue in the U.S. needs to be rethought.

British newspaper reporter Polly Curtis strides around back corridors of the Houses of Parliament with a steely confidence in her paper's mission:

Get the facts. Be fair. And reflect a particular political tradition.

"We have the stated aim to be the world's leading liberal voice," says Curtis, the Whitehall (government) correspondent for The Guardian in London. "We are left-leaning, but primarily liberal at heart."

Perhaps the best thing to happen would be an American network with an open and blatant left-leaning or liberal broadcast identity similar to what Fox openly declares daily.

It seems a much better than what we deal with now which amounts to successful public influence by sheer biased repetition on the one hand and liberal distasted for such blatantly partisan broadcast tactics.

… as if there were something unpatriotic about news reporting with a bias or particular point of view.

Liberals for years now have found themselves sorely disappointed in every news organization other than Fox because of what is perceived as an inconsistency in fair reporting or a constancy of silliness in attempting to stay neutral and publish with equal gravity all points of view.

In the U.S., most mainstream news organizations promise to report "without fear or favor," as the saying goes. Newspaper editorial pages with a point of view are segregated from the news reports. There's less of a distinction on cable channels, where intense opinion shows are often rewarded with high ratings.

So to American eyes, the British media operate in a looking-glass world in which the major TV news channels — the BBC and Sky News — try to serve up the news without opinion, but Britain's big daily newspapers are pretty clear about what they favor. And that inversion offers some insight into the debate over media bias here in the U.S.

… Nick Boles, a Conservative member of Parliament from England's East Midlands region. "Whereas with The Telegraph, they'd probably be more likely to be ... looking for ways in which the government was betraying the Conservative cause."

Boles says he's not crazy about the way either publication treats him, but at least he knows what he's getting.

"In Britain, we feel that it's better to know where people are coming from and then to make up your own mind about what you think, because the truth is nobody can be completely impartial and objective," Boles says. "I mean the idea [that] The New York Times doesn't have a political point of view — it's ridiculous. It does, but it twists itself into knots in an attempt to pretend that it doesn't."

For one such as I who has for years been outraged by Fox News’ bias and one-sided reporting and simultaneously more or less satisfied by personalities such as Maddow and Olbermann who stick up for the liberal view and with whom I mostly find sympathetic agreement, I have but one caution … but a big one … regarding openly bias broadcasting.

Fox in touting fairness and balance went too far, making of itself a political tool and arm of the Republican party.  Fox attempted successfully to create news and crossed the line repeatedly into exaggeration and outright deception.

Even in an environment of bias broadcasting, citizens with strong opinions and biases themselves ought to possess sufficient civic duty awareness so as to maintain a willingness to insist on above-board broadcasting … to eschew the use of deception in order to effect a political outcome that otherwise becomes an illegitimate success story.

Then of course we ought to have our own version of the BBC which more or less  maintains a global reputation of broadcasting the news as it occurs with little regard to framing or defining the news for listeners. Certainly those things happen, but against the larger backdrop, don’t we all need a pretense that we understand what actually happens on the planet rather than what our biases wish would happen?