En route to objectivity

An upcoming book called “Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections,” by IU Telecommunications professors Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Bucy, argues that when it comes to visual images shown by the three major news networks, election coverage favors conservative candidates.  

Grabe and Bucy’s findings require us, as newspaper consumers, to reevaluate our notions of media bias.

Those who argue for complete media objectivity seem to think it is reasonable to set our sights toward some happy day when a person would be able to read a newspaper and soak everything in without having to question it, because the reporting would be so perfectly and happily objective.

Regardless of what we as consumers of the news tell ourselves, this is not what we want at all. We don’t want to know just the facts.

We want implications.

We want to know why the things that are happening today mean something.
Journalists must compile information and make connections between what has happened today and what has happened before.

So a plane crashed yesterday. That doesn’t mean anything to me beyond, “Wow, that doesn’t happen a lot,” unless you tell me that this is the 15th plane crash in such and such period and that there are speculations about the need to cut down on blah blah blah.

The mere who-what-where-and-whens of an incident mean nothing without context and an understanding of the implications.

But that’s where the problem of bias comes in.

Whenever reporters, or people for that matter, move beyond a basic account of what happened and into the realm of interpretation and analysis, they open themselves up to the possibility of getting it wrong, of misrepresenting and – if you are a journalist – of being called biased.

We deal with this problem in real life all the time. When a neighbor says, “Mrs. Rogers vacuums her lawn. She must be crazy,” most of us have the good sense to separate the fact part of her statement from the analysis part.

Of course, the problem of doing the same thing in newspapers comes in when it is difficult to tell where the facts stop and the analysis begins.

And because of this, many argue that we should jettison the analysis altogether and stick to “just the facts.”

But to do that would be to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, to nix the only part of the news that makes news worth knowing or reading.

Instead, we as readers should stop demanding a castrated version of current events and approach everything we read in newspapers with the same skepticism we greet things with in everyday life.

It is our duty to ask as we read, “What are they not telling me?” and “How did they reach that conclusion?”

News as a product of humans will never be perfect in either its reporting or its analysis. Instead of stripping away everything except the root facts, we should instead welcome analysis and contextualizing, all the while maintaining our sense of skepticism.