Next week, Americans will choose their President. Yet, when voters most need the truth, and facts are available instantaneously from many sources, a recent Gallup poll shows that Americans’ confidence in media has reached new lows. This distrust largely stems from perceptions of bias.
However, the pursuit of balance should be an equal cause for concern. For many media outlets, balance merely entails giving both sides of a story equal representation. This may seem reasonable, but what happens when one side is objectively right or wrong? Then, media outlets do the public disservice by falling back on “he-said-she-said” coverage that makes no attempt to distinguish fact from fiction. Mark McKinnon, former top media advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain, aptly tells the HPR, “getting both sides doesn’t mean you’re getting at the truth.”
Truth in the Balance?
‘Balanced’ reporting may encourage politicians and interest groups to make misleading claims, knowing that they can get uncritical media coverage. Rather than call them out, the media often only reports the original statement and the opponent’s rebuttal, without attempting to discern the truth. For instance, Mitt Romney’s campaign garnered considerable press attention with its claim that the Obama administration had removed the work requirement from welfare. The claim was widely denounced as false by experts and fact-checkers. Yet, as the Columbia Journalism Review reported, some newspapers either quoted only the Obama campaign’s response or buried the independent experts’ rebuttals deep within articles. This created a typical tit-for-tat situation in which voters would not know whom to believe.
While he-said-she-said is widely, “accepted, conventional and problematic,” McKinnon believes that the welfare attack was, “so egregious and so patently wrong that … the media did a good job pointing it out.” Nevertheless, the Romney campaign got its message out, which explains why McKinnon laments, “increasingly, campaigns don’t seem to care about the truth.”
By not calling politicians out for false statements and providing equal coverage for all views, the media gives disproportionate attention to beliefs that defy broadly accepted empirical data. One example of such false balance concerns global warming. According to a study conducted by experts Jules and Maxwell Boykoff, “When it comes to U.S. media coverage of global warming, superficial balance—telling ‘both’ sides of the story—can actually be a form of informational bias…[and has] allowed a small group of global warming skeptics to have their views greatly amplified.” When equal coverage is combined with a failure to fact-check, people have little aside from preexisting biases to guide them.
Journalists’ Balancing Act
There are longstanding disincentives for journalists to fact-check aggressively. Professor Alex Jones, Director of the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, told the HPR that, “journalists don’t like to do it because it infuriates the people who are corrected,” and “access is an important part of journalism.” Jones further explained that it is highly unusual for a print journalist to directly call someone a liar, as it is the “culture of American journalism to be more dispassionate.”
Professor Richard Parker, also of the Shorenstein Center, told the HPR that some journalists have a strong belief that they are within, “an ‘inner circle’ of decision-makers, one in which the journalist’s role is to convey decisions and persuade the public of their rightness.” Moreover, he-said-she-said is faster and easier for journalists who, in the era of electronic media, operate under ever-tighter deadlines. According to Parker, journalists themselves believe “almost universally” that failure to investigate the truth results from “time and deadline pressures.”
Money similarly plays a determining role: when print publications are struggling financially, fact-checking departments are considered luxuries. After Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson’s inaccuracy-laden cover piece attacking President Obama, Newsweek acknowledged that, “like other news organizations today,” it does not employ fact-checkers. A writer for The Economist’s Democracy in America blog summarized the situation more bluntly: “Balance is easy and cheap. In political journalism, a vitriolic quote from each side and a punchy headline is all that is needed to feed the news machine.”
Such reporting also shields journalists from the burden of making judgment calls that can leave them open to accusations of bias. Jones suggested that the hyper-partisanship of American politics makes journalists especially cautious to, “avoid shrill cries of bias by including a perspective that may simply not have any basis… that that is a craven way to do journalism, but…one that helps you avoid trouble.”
Accusations of bias often come from activist bloggers and media watchdog groups. According to Jones, such entities can play a useful role in monitoring reporters, but they can also “terrify people and intimidate them,” and journalists fear “being pilloried by bloggers.”
Moreover, the “truth” is not necessarily clear-cut. Parker observes that one problem with ‘objectivity’ is that, “objectivity is a socially relative concept.” Tellingly, the Society of Professional Journalists removed “objectivity” from its Code of Ethics in 1996. While journalists have a duty to check the accuracy of facts, sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between fact and opinion. Rather than make too many such judgments, journalists often elect to give both sides coverage and move on.
Can Fact-Checkers Tip the Balance?
While the media may not fact-check aggressively, numerous websites have emerged to fill the void. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, head of FactCheck.org and Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, explained FactCheck.org’s policy to the HPR, stating that its goal was to, “Determine how the source justifies a claim and seek corroborative or disconfirming evidence.” While fact-checkers are valuable, Jones believes they are, “providing a corrective that the reporter should have done himself.”
However, many of these organizations have themselves been accused of bias, which has created some familiar problems. Readers may not trust the fact-checkers, and thus politicians may not fear being criticized by them. McKinnon worries that hyper-partisanship means that being called out “can be a badge of honor.” For example, Romney pollster Neil Newhouse recently stated in response to pushback from fact-checkers over the welfare ads that, “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Perhaps reacting to such accusations of bias, some fact-checkers are engaging in the same false balance already prevalent in mainstream news reporting.
Beyond Balance
Journalism is a highly competitive profession in which reporters race to crank out the latest news. Sorting through an issue to separate fact from fiction can be tricky and time-consuming, and in the current political climate, any reporter who appears even remotely biased faces pushback. Thus, it is easy to understand why many journalists hide behind he-said-she-said reporting.
However, when this happens they deprive readers of the opportunity to make an informed decision and allow politicians and interest groups to spread misinformation with little fear of consequence. Fact-checking organizations may help, but they tend to reach predominately high-information voters and have little effect on campaigns, which often ignore them or accuse them of bias. Until journalists themselves behave more like investigators and less like stenographers, politicians may see little disadvantage to dishonesty.