Post by ck4829 on Dec 16, 2016 20:54:48 GMT
A politician announces the sky is green, so a skeptical and objective journalist seeks out others who say the sky is actually blue. Both sides of the story are presented to the journalist’s readers, listeners or viewers who can then make an informed decision about the color of the sky.
This is what I was taught in my long-ago journalism classes, anyway. A professional never takes at face value what a politician or anyone else says. There are almost always opposing facts and views or mitigating circumstances the public should know about.
The news media has traditionally performed this job about as well as politicians perform theirs. There were shining moments, too, when startling truths were presented to the American public: Edward R. Murrow calling out Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Walter Cronkite’s reports from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers published in the New York Times.
Unfortunately, journalistic skepticism has been replaced in some quarters by something called confirmation bias, a term borrowed from science. Journalists practicing confirmation bias present only that which validates their audience’s prejudices.
An entire business has sprung from confirmation bias in the form of conservative media, Fox News being the most prominent example. The brainchild of its disgraced founder, Roger Ailes, Fox News was created as the right-wing antithesis to skeptical and objective reporting.
As a former Reagan White House communications operative, Ailes noticed conservatives didn’t like objective reporting about Ronald Reagan’s failures. When, for example, credible news media factually reported President Reagan had authorized the sale of arms to Iran in violation of a U.S. embargo, conservatives howled “liberal media bias.”
www.mdjonline.com/opinion/kevin-foley-the-death-of-skepticism/article_c133105c-c334-11e6-b81c-b381f8fa9d36.html
This is what I was taught in my long-ago journalism classes, anyway. A professional never takes at face value what a politician or anyone else says. There are almost always opposing facts and views or mitigating circumstances the public should know about.
The news media has traditionally performed this job about as well as politicians perform theirs. There were shining moments, too, when startling truths were presented to the American public: Edward R. Murrow calling out Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Walter Cronkite’s reports from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers published in the New York Times.
Unfortunately, journalistic skepticism has been replaced in some quarters by something called confirmation bias, a term borrowed from science. Journalists practicing confirmation bias present only that which validates their audience’s prejudices.
An entire business has sprung from confirmation bias in the form of conservative media, Fox News being the most prominent example. The brainchild of its disgraced founder, Roger Ailes, Fox News was created as the right-wing antithesis to skeptical and objective reporting.
As a former Reagan White House communications operative, Ailes noticed conservatives didn’t like objective reporting about Ronald Reagan’s failures. When, for example, credible news media factually reported President Reagan had authorized the sale of arms to Iran in violation of a U.S. embargo, conservatives howled “liberal media bias.”
www.mdjonline.com/opinion/kevin-foley-the-death-of-skepticism/article_c133105c-c334-11e6-b81c-b381f8fa9d36.html