Fair, not balanced

Turn on the Fox News Channel nearly any time of day, and you'll see it in big letters: "Fair and Balanced." It's their slogan, and whether they themselves live up to it is a point of contention, but the phrase itself exemplifies much of what is wrong with today's news.

The media has an obligation to democracy -- without it, the voters, the people who are theoretically the decision-makers, cannot make informed choices. Unfortunately, our ability to discern the real from the spin and to force our elected officials to do the right thing is becoming more and more constrained, and a lot of it has to do with this new concept of "balance" in journalism.

The idea of balance is a radical departure from journalism as we used to conceive it. Fox News would like you simply to believe that this new standard means that they are not biased, as they often incorrectly tell viewers the rest of the media is, but the truth is that it runs deeper than that.

Where once reporters had an obligation to be objective -- to be fair and impartial judges but unafraid of reporting the truth as they saw it -- their new obligation is apparently to report uncritically any talking point trotted out by either side of an issue in the interest of being "balanced." Instead of giving the people the facts, the new standard simply calls for reporters to ask one side for their comment and then allow the other side to respond with a similar quote, replacing real investigation with he-said/she-said journalism. It is a standard which has meant that lies go unquestioned and stories go unreported because reporters and news organizations fear being labeled as biased. It is a standard which has left our media without a spine.

What's happening now in conservative circles is a tactic dating back to the Nixon White House and Watergate: if you can't challenge the facts, challenge the messenger. And so the media's reporting on everything from the torture in Abu Ghraib to Bill O'Reilly's sexual harassment lawsuit is questioned until news organizations are bullied into either just shutting up or repeating the right wing's newest spin.

In October, Matt Drudge, perhaps the Internet's most visible conservative, posted a story on his Web site which went right to the heart of the matter. It seemed that Mark Halperin, the political director for ABC News, believed that President Bush's distortions of the facts during the election were more egregious than Senator Kerry's. He released a memo to his staff which said that they should not "reflexively and artificially hold both sides 'equally' accountable." Drudge immediately seized on this as just another example of liberal bias in big media, but nothing could be further from the truth.

What Halperin called on his staff to do is precisely the job that a responsible news organization should be doing. It is not the job of reporters to pretend that one event is tantamount to another for the sake of "balance." Instead, they should be doing exactly what Halperin asked: not underreport Kerry's distortions (and there were plenty), but at the same time point out that Bush's were often more damaging and more purposeful, if indeed the facts supported such a conclusion.

The average citizen cannot possibly be expected to comprehend the nuances of every policy matter. From Iraq to Social Security, there are details that need to be explained so that the voters can fully understand them, and the media is doing us a disservice by resorting to he-said/she-said journalism. There was a time, as was the case in the Watergate era, when the media was willing to challenge its sources to bring its consumers the best possible story. Today, falsehoods go uncorrected, and like in the Social Security debate, competing facts and figures are bandied about without any insight in to their accuracy.

It sounds corny, but proper reporting really is a life-and-death matter. It could have kept us out of Iraq. The continuing lack of it keeps us from having a proper accounting of responsibility for the tragedy of September 11th.

Not every issue is a partisan one, with two sides to be accounted for ---- there are in many cases simple objective facts that need to be reported which could potentially save lives. To pretend that "balance" is what is called for in journalism is simply a betrayal of everything it should stand for and a betrayal of the people who will be hurt if our media continues in failing to do its job.

Alex Koppelman is a senior individualized major in the College from Baltimore and former editor-in-chief of 34th Street Magazine. Rock the Casbah appears on Thursdays.

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