Hello. When citizen of Post-Soviet country hears the phrase “News media”, the next thing he or she usually thinks is “Bias” or “Unfairness”. It's an easy charge to make. Few will argue with it. But if you’re going to claim that journalism is slanted, how do you prove it? Today, we're going right into the heart of the controversy so you can decide for yourself what is balance, what is fairness, and what is bias, both in the news media and... in your head. Let's begin with fairness. Fair news coverage is marked by impartiality and honesty free from self-interest, prejudice, or favoritism. Being fair to the people and institution being covered - and being “fair to the evidence”. We'll come back to what that means. Here's a simple list to start with checking out the news for fairness: fair language, fair presentation, and fair play. Being fair to the people and institutions being covered means fair language. Journalists had to use neutral words like “said” instead of “admitted” and not adopting the loaded language of political technologists. Fair presentation includes the selection of illustrations and visual journalism, photos, videos, charts, and graphics. Fair journalism has to present photos and other visuals that are appropriate to the report without any connotations. And it means fair play, including all relevant perspectives and giving newsmakers a chance to respond to negative charges against them. When reporting of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, some looters were called “looters” and others were not. The nature of each description presents the image to you in an amazingly different way. You wouldn't notice it probably unless you were looking at multiple news outlets and they were taking different approaches to describing people who broke into stores and took supplies. To continue our study of fair play in journalism, I'd like you to recall the first week of our course. We talked that any media vehicle is limited either by the space for publishing news stories, or by the time for their broadcast and playback. That is why editorials always have to make a choice. Sometimes fair play demands balance - equal prominence, equal space, or equal time for both sides. Pay close attention now. This is one of the key definitions in this course. What is balance? An equity, almost a mathematical equivalence. It is disputed between two sides when there is conflicting evidence, or points of view and no definitive evidence to suggest one side is right. In other words: we need balance in a news report when there's an unknown, developing, or disputed element in the story. Unfortunately, there are people who deny reality, such as holocaust deniers. There are some like ex-President of Iran who treat the Holocaust not like an actual occurrence for which there's an endless amount of evidence and instead like the source of political or ideological debate. Would it be fair to give a Holocaust denier equal time with the historian or the Holocaust, or a survivor? No — doing so risks suggesting to the audience that both sides deserve equal weight when one side is clearly right on the fact and the other is full of nonsense. In sum, there are four types of news coverage: Fair and balanced - that's good. The second: fair but not balanced. This is also good - it describes a story in which the evidence is on one side and balance is not required. The third: not fair but balanced is a problem. It falsely gives equal weight to two sides when evidence clearly favors only one side. And the last of course — not fair and not balanced is bad.
