Fair To Everyone

It seems almost innocuous, a toss-off line at the end of a Public Editor piece by Clark Hoyt in the NY Times, dealing with questions about quoting anonymous sources:

The Public Editor - Fairness and the Accused - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

A newspaper is obliged to be fair to everyone.

However, this statement sheds light on one of the fundamental points of contention regarding the social benefits of 20th century journalism. One of the claims of those most avidly supporting traditional journalism is that it creates a level playing field for many contending viewpoints, that well-groomed journalism will provide a balanced view of complex issues.

Those who have argued against this attack it on several fronts.

Cognitive science and modern linguistics have begun to unwind the workings of our minds in ways that journalism hasn’t. We now have learned that people cannot reason without relying on deep-seated and perhaps irrational beliefs, based on a sense of what is right, what works, how the world works, and who we are in relation to others. No one has found a cognitive basis for objectivity.

More damning perhaps: traditional journalism is tied to the piety of a hypothetical objectivity, of ‘being fair to everyone,’ but even in the small example of sourcing anonymous quotes we see how this falls down in practice. And in the larger issues — like deciding who can be included in important discussions, deciding who is a legitimate actor and who instead should be excluded — newspapers have done a bad job of providing open social discourse. Just consider the crackpot ‘scientists’ denying climate change that were provided a platform for decades by journalists striving for ‘balance’. Observers like Benkler and Rosen have plowed this field pretty well in recent years.

But in the editorial pages, the white lie of fairness and balance is still considered a given: not a hypothesis, but a law of nature, or at least a cultural totem that cannot be put aside, a shibolleth.

(It’s like the widely accepted premises of the perfectability of the self that underlies so much of our culture. Our world of self-help books, of closet organizing consultants, the endless dieting and Tony Robbins seminars: it’s all based on the moral principle that we should be trying, endlessly, to stand straighter, polish our teeth, clean our desktops, and that this will make us better in some moral dimension. Who says?)

I don’t know what sort of social discourse we might have if we rejected the outdated, Edwardian fallacies that form the pedestal on which journalism seems to stand. I like to think we’d be better off if we accepted the universals of human nature and dropped the quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo of the flailing and failing world of old school journalism. Accept bias and partiality as a given, and naturally present in every sentence we utter, not something to be denied. Accept it, and move on.

Returning to the germ from which this springs: This means the balancing act that editors try to pull off around anonymous sources is impossible. Anonymous quotes should be dropped because they generally favor the well-positioned and powerful who reporters try to gain insights from. We know these people are gaming the system to their benefit, and that reporters and editors — however ‘balanced’ and ‘fair’ they seek to be — are parties to a system that attempts to control public discourse on matters of importance to all of us, including the small and powerless.