TRUTH IN THE MEDIA: A BIASED OPINION

Anthony Read

The good journalist will; Report and interpret honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts...not suppress relevant available facts, or give distorting emphasis. (Media Alliance Code of Ethics). Does this assume the truth can be known? And if it cannot how do we establish any distinction between good journalism and bad journalism?

When journalism was first making its baby steps into the world, George T. Rider of the North American Review launched an attack on what he saw as the pretensions of journalism. He said that journalism has a short rootand no treasury in the past. It is without traditions, precedentsorganisation or corporate relations. Most importantly, Rider said that journalism is only one impersonal voice comment (1882, pp. 471). Journalism has changed vastly since then. Rider also makes reference to the way he viewed journalism, that is as beginning to take on a life of its own, beyond pure comment and reason (1882) Into the postmodern era, these reflections by Rider have become increasingly correct and widespread. The Media Alliance Code of Ethics (MACE) gives twelve ways for journalists to improve their writing and ensure their honesty while reporting (Alliance Online 2005). The most interesting point, and the most debated, is the first. To report and interpret honestly is a dubious value. At the moment, the media world (as well as our own moral values) are split between two camps: that of the Kantian and that of the Utilitarian. The Kantian values a higher truth more than anything else, and places emphasis on motives to judge whether an action is right or wrong. On the other hand, the Utilitarian places emphasis on the outcomes of an action on a discrete number of people. At first glance, the MACE is a Kantian document. But it also holds elements of Utilitarianism as well. To report honestly is a Kantian outlook, as we can only report honestly if we honestly wish to. However, to interpret honestly is difficult. We can interpret with good intention, but all our outcomes would differ, due to differing perspectives. Whose perspective is right? No-ones and everyones. The next part on striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts is another tricky moral map. Fairness is an easy element to capture, since a journalist can provide fairness by providing balancing comments and facts from all sides of an argument. But what happens when twenty arguments from one side still do not outweigh one from the other? This does not matter, as the journalist is simply striving for fairness. It is in the striving that he finds his moral ground, not in the outcome. The same goes for accuracy and disclosure. Accuracy is a difficult beast to tame, as many perspectives on an event may lead close to what happened, but will never provide a full picture. Disclosure finds itself on bad ground too, as disclosing all relevant facts about any story casts a net too wide for a simple news story. Relevant facts can mean differing things to different people. Someone might find the news they find relevant at the bottom of the middle page of the newspaper, while another will not even bother to look. As we can see, the MACE falls under both Kantian and Utilitarian moral codes, but mainly consists of a Kantian approach. The moral deed is done in the motive, not the outcome. As addressed earlier, the ability of a journalist to successfully not suppress available factsor give distorting emphasis is hotly debated. The issue with suppressing available facts is that someone may find the most banal feature of a story (to the writer) to be the most important. This concept can be applied to photography as well.

A picture in a newspaper may claim to show the truth of an event, but it directly omits what happens outside the frame. In fact, all our actions in life have various omissions of facts inherit. An example is someone being asked what they have planned for a day. They would give a brief overview of the main events, but would skip over the minor details in the middle. How are we to know that the minor details are not the most important facts to the listener? Bolinger sums it up nicely when he says that there are lies implicit in presuppositions, deletions, indirectionsin the lexicon *of language+ (1973, pp. 539). Omissions are inescapable. Perhaps people reading into these omissions is the issue. A journalist may accidentally not include information in a story, or have it cut out by senior editors. This does not mean that the journalist had misleading intentions. It is just part of the process. Nietzsche addresses the issue of truth across his lifes work, with a heavy emphasis on language being metaphorical rather than literal. He takes the stance that words are always referring to something else instead of purely themselves (Hinman, 1982). This refers to truth as something which can only be deferred in meaning, and is never pure truth in itself. Another idea Nietzsche pushed was that of perspectivism. This is the idea that ones perspective forms their reality. He confuses the idea of truth in perspectivism even more by saying that our conceptions of truth and objectivity are reduced to meeting our epistemic standards (Anderson 1998). This directly contradicts Baileys opinion, formed in 1919, that the white light of truth and sanity is what journalism needs, instead of orange journalism, staccato and propagandist (1919, pp. 227). Over the past ninety years, it seems as though journalism has evolved so it cannot truly report objectively with this white light. All these postmodern ideas point to the idea that truth is impossible to attain. This does not bode well for the media industry, which has based its creed on objectivity in reporting. The MACE, when held under the light of Nietzsches ideas, falls apart at a rapid rate. The bold statement do not plagiarise can be undermined by asking where many story ideas come from. Does taking yesterdays story from another newspaper and putting a new angle on it mean that one has plagiarised? Also, conflicts of interest doom virtually all media under postmodern ideals. The Age used to be subtitled with Australias Independent Newspaper. How can a newspaper be truly independent when it is owned by a media mogul with financial obligations to himself and his shareholders? Any story found to be damaging to either the paper or the mogul will not be included or spun to create a more optimistic angle. This all suggests the MACE is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps, as suggested before, the MACE is useful in practice rather than the final product? This would make more sense and allow journalists to follow to code to the best of their ability. By this same token, we would now expect the difference between good and bad journalism to be based on process rather than outcome. This suggests a strong Kantian outlook of the journalism process. An example of

what was titled good journalism in the 1890s was James Creelman. His writing style was in direct contradiction to the inverted pyramid used in journalism today. He was revered for his ability to interview such stars as Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Edison, the King of Korea, Teddy Roosevelt and the Pope (1993, pp. 750). He also was an ace war correspondent, and led a charge in the Spanish American war. Perhaps his heroic deeds allowed him to write more freely, since he had the respect and honour of the American people? As one can see from this example, many things, including the era of the writing and the status of the writer, can shape the barriers between good and bad journalism. Also, one must not forgot Nietzsches concept of perspectivism, which then tells us that we can only judge between good and bad journalism based on our perspectives, and nothing else. In the past, and up to today, the emphasis on good journalism has been placed on hard news, that being the first thirty pages of any newspaper. This news is delivered according to the MACE, as unbiased, balanced and objective as possible. Bad news has mostly been left to the tenants of opinion writing. Opinion pieces are seen to be nothing more than opinions, that they hold no court with the lofty ideals of objectively reporting hard news. What postmodernism does is flip good and bad journalism, making opinion writing the revered form and bringing hard news down a few notches. If Nietzsches idea that perspectivism is all there is, then surely well informed opinions are the most honest forms of journalism. The opposite goes for hard news, in that saying a piece is objectively reported is nothing but folly, and the journalists are just fooling themselves. Objectivity and balance must be attempted in practice, but journalists should never think that their outcomes will be the truth, one and only. One can now see that journalism is inherently flawed. Perhaps not in process, but in the outcome. The idea of objective reporting must be abandoned, simply because in these postmodern times, nothing can be truly described as the sole truth. A way out may be feature writing, where the journalist combines both hard news (facts and figures) with interviews and storytelling techniques. This allows a personal opinion to shine through, while still attempting to relay facts about a particular issue. This form of journalism allows us a new horizon to aspire to: one which does not pretend truth, but shows the way around it and the perspectives on it.

REFERENCE LIST
Alliance Online, 2009. Media Alliance Code of Ethics, http://www.alliance.org.au/media_alliance_code_of_ethics/. Accessed 24/8/09.

Anderson R, 1998, Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism, Synthese. Vol 115, No 1, pp. 1-32.

Bailey T, 1919. Orange Journalism, The Sewanee Review. Vol 27, No 2, pp. 227-238.

Beckerman M, 1993. The Real Value of Yellow Journalism: James Creelman and Antonin Dvoak, The Musical Quarterly. Vol 77, No 4, pp. 749-768.

Bolinger D, 1973. Truth is a Linguistic Question, Language. Vol 49, No 3, pp. 539-550.

Hinman L, 1982. Nietzsche, Metaphor and Truth, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Vol 43, No 2, pp. 179-199.

Rider G, 1882. The Pretensions of Journalism, The North American Review. Vol 135, No 312, pp. 471-483.