Those who know me will be familiar with what I'm about to say: when it comes to reporting, fairness is a must. A good reporter has to set aside any pre-existing notions they might have about a given story and report all sides as equally and fairly as possible - no exceptions.
Except that doesn't happen. Not always for a lack of trying, at least. In a world where opinion can be viewed more favourably than fact, fairness in reporting is easily pushed to the side in favour of partisan advantage.
Edward R. Murrow once said the following: to be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.
To that I would add a question -- can we be truthful without being fair?
Murrow is also famously quoted as having said that 'I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.' And while I am willing to accept that opposing sides may not have, in terms of volume, the same ammunition with which to present their side of the argument, I am not willing to accept that one (or more) sides should be shut out completely.
But in today's media world, it's become far too commonplace to see the term 'unavailable or unwilling to comment'. Does that help anyone involved in a story? No. Does it alleviate one side from taking responsibility for their side of an argument? Yes. Should the reporter be willing to leave it at just 'no comment' when clearly that's not going to work out and present a fair and balanced accounting of a story?
No, but it's not sunny every day and I don't routinely shoot six-under-par when I play tough golf courses either. I fully grasp why those who are on an unpopular side of a story are willing to obfuscate or misrepresent or simply say nothing at all; it saves them from having to admit that what they have to contribute is false, unpopular or unsustainable.
But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be said. In the telling of the less pleasant side of a story, those seeking to be informed are learning about one side as equally as the other. Do I expect a politician or a corporate entity to admit when they've been caught in a lie? No, but I would hope they don't simply doubled down in an attempt to make the first lie seem more plausible.
When I began looking around for a blog topic, I came across the Online New Association and their 'Build Your Own Ethics Code' project. Among the topics listed was balance and fairness, and they covered the idea of 'false balance' where an opposing viewpoint is presented if the facts are presumably well known. They use the example of evolution and ask if 'creation science' should be given equal representation despite not being factually proven. They also use global warming to demonstrate their point.
They also bring up the area of breaking news, something that has radically changed with the growth of the Internet. You no longer need a radio or television to get the most up-to-date news as it happens -- evidently, all you need is a Twitter account. In an age where some media outlets report first and fact-check second, Twitter has subjected many of those same outlets to the role of audience member when crowd-sourced news is tweeted out. The ONA rightly questions what damage is done when this happens, and in a digital age one has to wonder how long that damage actually lasts.
I gave this some thought and then went digging. I found a website called www.demandsage.com that provided some Twitter statistics (some of which I was able to verify through other means). As of the publication of this article by Daniel Ruby (linked here), here's what jumped out at me: Twitter has approximately 450 million active monthly users, with 237.8 million of those being monetizable daily active users; it generated $5 billion in revenue in 2021; there were about 6,000 Tweets per second in 2022, which ends up at 200 billion Tweets in a year.
The most interesting part of this article - and the one that relates most to what I'm writing about here -- was point #21: In 2017, Twitter doubled its character count from 140 to 280, and the change had the following affects: only one per cent of Tweets hit the 280 limit, while just 12 per cent topped 140 and five per cent were longer than 190; the average length in characters is now 33 -- down one from when you had half as many available.
This matters because reporters are always fighting for more space and time to tell the story the right way. I remember my days as a reporter struggling to get enough column inches, and when I transitioned to online platforms I knew I had to make my point succinctly or I risked losing my readers. I have no idea how many of those 450 million users are media members, but I wonder how many of them are wannabe reporters thinking they're breaking a big story when all they're doing is possibly distorting the viewpoint of something they just happened to catch a glimpse of.
I'm not going to be naive enough to think that my ranting about the need for fairness is going to re-balance things. Large-scale reporting is only partly about presenting the consumer with what they need to know; the other half is entertaining those who already believe what that outlet wants them to. Someone in Canada who supports firearms rights is more likely to believe what they read in a publication like the Toronto Sun, while someone who opposes that viewpoint may favour the Toronto Star.
So perhaps we need a three-sided scale in order to assess media fairness, as it greatly depends on the lens on which news is viewed through (despite my belief that news has no right or left to it).
But the quest for fairness should be one that continues, or else Murrow's most lasting words may be these: we will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by feat into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.
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