Vanilla ice cream is good. Chocolate ice cream is better.
Strawberry? Yuck!
That’s my taste. Yours is different, and I’m OK with that. Are you OK?
News comes the same way. Some of it is slanted to the right. Some is slanted to the left.
But there is more vanilla out there than most Americans recognize.
Conservative columnist Cal Thomas brought attention to bias in the news media in a column that we published Friday (“Survey says: They hate us, but who cares?”).
The column cited the 2015 State of the First Amendment Survey, a project of the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center. The survey said that only 24 percent now think that the news media try to report on news without bias. That’s a 17-point drop from 2014 and a 22-percent drop from 2013.
My conclusion: Many Americans now actually prefer “flavored” news. They seek television networks and websites that spin the news the way they want it. But the left scoffs at what’s out there for the right and thinks it is wrong, and vice versa.
Conservatives listen to Rush Limbaugh. Liberals watch “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
Liberals read The New York Times and conservatives read The Wall Street Journal because they get what they want on those editorial pages.
News flash: The “news” on those pages isn’t news. It’s clearly presented as opinion.
Another news flash: I’ve never watched Jon Stewart, but I sometimes listen to Rush Limbaugh. Though he’s bombastic, he’s smart, passionate and entertaining. I would characterize his show more as anti-liberal than anything. If you want to know what liberals are saying, his show is a great source. Just dismiss the spin.
It amuses me when Limbaugh rails against the mainstream media, as if he isn’t media. If he isn’t mainstream, then why are liberal counterparts mainstream?
Local news organizations seem to get caught in the crossfire. Conservatives consider The New York Times a liberal newspaper. The Morning News is a newspaper. Therefore, the Morning News is a liberal newspaper.
I find the news on NBC balanced, but conservatives think the network is liberal. WMBF is our local NBC affiliate. Is WMBF guilty of bias by association?
Some news consumers confuse balance with bias. A news story should tell both sides of a story, but radicals don’t want to see or hear what the other side has to say.
The day after the Charleston church massacre, we assigned a local reaction story on gun control. It was easy for our reporter to find people on one side of that heated issue, but gun proponents either didn’t want to talk that day or didn’t want to go on the record with their thoughts. Because we couldn’t balance the story, we didn’t run it.
Some news consumers confuse news with opinion. The editorials, columns, letters and cartoons on the Opinion pages are biased by nature.
We try hard to balance our Opinion page, and toward that end we seem to confound some of our readers. For instance, some readers still don’t seem to understand the difference between an editorial and a column. This column is my opinion. An editorial is the opinion of an editorial board representing this newspaper.
On June 21, you might have read my column that tried to strike middle-of-the-road thoughts about guns (“Gun control? What we need is people control”). On the opposite page, we ran an anti-gun editorial cartoon. Henry Ham of Leesville wrote to ask: “So, which position does your paper take – blame the NRA, which fights for our 2nd Amendment rights, or true common sense as discussed in your editorial?” The answer: Our paper did not take a position. Two individuals did, and they were differing positions.
In our news coverage, we strive to be objective, but that is an elusive goal. We make subjective calls in deciding which stories to do and not do. Our reporters make subjective decisions in deciding which questions to ask and not ask. They make judgment calls in deciding which facts should be at the beginning of a story, which ones should be at the end and which ones don’t need to be included at all.
Does that mean our news stories are biased? No. We don’t go out of our way to slant the news. News stories are framed, but we want to be fair.
That’s different from flair. In features (and columns), we try to put some sprinkles on your vanilla ice cream.
