Slacktivist contrasts news reporters with sports reporters, who have to report the facts [Who won the game? : What's the score? (Mar 22, 2005)]
It is sometimes said, in rants like this against the plague of he-said/she-said journalism, that news reporters behave like they're covering a tennis match. But the real problem is that he-said/she-said journalists are nowhere near as responsible as sports writers. Sports reporters, first and foremost, have a duty as indifferent arbiters of the facts. That's a duty that hard news journalists have long since abandoned.[emphasis added]
The paper I work for today is running a Q&A from the Associated Press about "the facts" of the Terry Schiavo case. One of the questions asks if Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state. The Q&A does not provide an answer -- it provides instead two, mutually exclusive answers: Some doctors say she is, but her parents' doctors say she isn't. That's not a Q&A, that's a Q&Q. "Who are we too say?" is not an answer.
The Schiavo case demonstrates the problem of partisan epistemology. We now have "red facts" and "blue facts." Newspapers -- hoping not to upset either faction of their potential circulation -- have no intention in taking sides in such disputes. Thus two competing sets of claims, two very different sets of facts, two opposing narratives, are treated as equally valid. News reporters, unlike sports reporters, feel no responsibility to check the scoreboard, or even to acknowledge that there is a scoreboard. They tend to deny the possibility that a scoreboard might even exist.
C'mon reporters! Truth exists. Objective facts exist. Report them.
'Twas on that dark, that doleful night
When pow'rs of earth and hell arose
Against the Son of God's delight
And friends betrayed Him to His foes.
--1st verse of a Maundy Thursday hymn by Isaac Watts, 1709
When pow'rs of earth and hell arose
Against the Son of God's delight
And friends betrayed Him to His foes.
--1st verse of a Maundy Thursday hymn by Isaac Watts, 1709
