The Media... Objective or Bias?

Is the media objective or bias? Does the idea of balance distort the news? I guess it all depends on who you ask and who you are referring to. NPR’s Jeffery Durkin says readers want an opinion that is their own reflected back to them, when that does not happen people get angry. Durkin goes on to say that journalism, to keep clear of this anger, present two sides of the story and step back. “A lot of journalism tends to back off from drawing conclusion for fear of in sighting the wrath of the listener’s, viewers and readers, but I am not sure that the listeners viewers and readers are well served by that attitude.” Is this a service to the public? What if there are more than two sides to a story, what if one side of the story has more facts and is much stronger? Does this make a news station seem bias when they are simply reporting what they know from each side of an argument? When asked about reporting on both sides of the story Jeffery Durkin said this, “I get it from both sides… its really a case where people who are on the left say they are outraged when they hear a point of view from the right, and they of course accuse MPR of caving, what ever that means; and then people from the right saying I am hearing people from the left on NPR with just confirms my suspensions that NPR is bias to the left”. Whey has the public become so cenacle with the media? “ The public has less patience and trust in the media overall, and they often assume the worst of us they assume we have an agenda and we are going to flog our personal ideas and that they intuit that curtain reporters or host have a political view that they are subtly or not so subtly inflicting on the public. This is not the case on public radio but this is seen certainly on talk radio and public television,” says Duikin. It is easy to see what has made the public so cynical when it comes to the news coverage. You can look to networks such as MSNBC and Fox News and see an obvious bias, echoing the point of view their target audiences wants to hear.
Why can’t we just fix some of these bias networks and in turn slowly change the public view of the news? That sounds easy enough, right? Wrong, Brent Cunningham, Managing Editor at the Columbia Journalism Review says, “The question of balance is a lot more complicated and a lot more slippery than comes across in most debates.” The problem is objectivity and balance tends to be over simplified. Cunningham goes on to explain “Traditionally to be an objective journalist requires you to write a balanced story, my problem with that is that the world is not a balanced place.” One of the hardest challenges facing journalism today is “when journalist say “all we do is present facts” that is misleading” says Jay Rosen a Journalism Professor and director of the Project on Public Life and the Press at New York University. Rosen goes on to explain that “that view of "everybody else but us is highly partisan" is itself an artifact of the ideology or doctrine of objectivity.”
The point is objectivity is near impossible to define in journalism. Even if you think you as a journalist are being objective at times your subject matter does not allow you to do so. You may not have all the facts; you may not have enough information to adequately tell both sides of a story. Objectivity and truth is more often then not lingering in some gray area that no one is able to quite tap into.

Media in Business: Press; Fairness, bias and judgment: grappling with the knotty issue of objectivity in journalism.
William Glaberson; New York Times; December 12, 1994
Media: Talk of The Nations; NPR April 17th 2006 With Jeffery Durkin; “Balance vs. Bias in Journalism”