RE: “Levelling with real journalism,” March 19-25, 2009
Where does the idea that journalism’s byline should be “Fair and Balanced” come from? We, as an audience, are meant to believe that journalism lives in a world without bias, where the “news” can come from an objective source that presents only facts. “We Report, You Decide,” the saying goes. But biases are like brains, we all have one. To quote Stephen Colbert, even “reality has a well known (liberal) bias.”
Last week The Charlatan published an attack against The Leveller. Boiled down to four words, the author’s criticism of The Leveller is that: It has a bias. Hardly a revelation for any person who picks up the newspaper and turns to the second page and reads what the paper is all about.
The Leveller has a bias; the paper admits it and is proud of it. Editors and writers for any paper, like the rest of us, have brains and they also have biases. Why should journalists pretend they have one without the other?
Drawing upon its name, The Leveller favours the abolition of all rank and privilege including the privilege of a mythical world where bias and opinion do not exist. And at the end of the day, I’d prefer to read a newspaper with a brain even if that means it comes with a bias.