12th Cleraun Media Conference
Facing the challenges — professional integrity
Saturday 18th & Sunday 19th October 2008
Striving for Fairness and Balance
Elena Cabral
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
I am very pleased to be here speaking with you today on the subject of striving for
fairness and balance. This is part of an ongoing conversation in journalism that adds
another dimension every time a new medium, a new event, a new debate emerges. It
is part of what makes this profession so dynamic. And it has been a part of my own
journey as a student of journalism, a reporter and now a teacher.
At Columbia, where I teach reporting and writing, students use as their laboratory the
endlessly fascinating, always changing and often complicated neighborhoods of New
York City. In my class, they choose one neighborhood to cover over a period of about
13 to 15 weeks, during which they produce stories about topics ranging from
education to religion to crime. They write about all types of conflicts: neighbor versus
neighbor, citizen versus government, even one generation versus another. Along the
way, they come to appreciate the basic truth about the business of telling stories, and
that is this:
Achieving fairness and balance is not something you can learn in a classroom and put
into practice with ease. It’s something that working journalists struggle with every
day. In short, it takes a good deal of work.
We talk a lot about fairness and balance generally after the fact—that is, after a story
has been written or broadcast—and mostly when a story doesn’t live up to our
standards of good reporting and writing (or when it provokes angry reactions from
readers). But in truth, a good reporter is thinking about fairness and balance at the
very start of the reporting process, from the moment he or she decides what to write
about—and what not to write about.
The very determination to put something in a newspaper or on the air —or not— is
something that even the most seasoned journalists wrestle with. One such time is
when there is a Presidential election like the one we are having right now in America.
For many, many months, reporters have been following the candidates, scrutinizing
their professional paths, their personal stories, their friends and families.
Shortly after Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin entered the race,
things seemed to move into uncharted territory when it was revealed that her
unmarried 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant. Reporters faced questions
about how to cover this revelation. Was it newsworthy? Was it relevant? Did this
news fall within a zone of privacy for a public figure like Palin?
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Supporters of Palin believed that it did. They chastised media outlets for writing about
it. Even Palin’s opponent, Barack Obama called the subject of Bristol Palin’s
pregnancy “off limits.’’
“This shouldn't be part of our politics,’’ Obama said. “It has no relevance to Gov.
Palin's performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice president.’’
But that didn’t end the debate, and it didn’t end the news coverage of the story.
Ultimately, one reason news outlets did report on the pregnancy was not to scrutinize
Bristol Palin herself, but because of the image and message her mother, the Governor
of Alaska, had cultivated as a conservative evangelical Christian. The pregnancy
raised an obvious question for the wing of the Republican Party that is staunchly
conservative, as Palin is, and focused on such family values as abstinence before
marriage. Would this raise a problem for the party, for the running mates?
Palin knew about the pregnancy when she accepted John McCain’s invitation to join
him on the Republican ticket and did not take steps to shield her daughter from the
spotlight. In fact, Bristol Palin and the baby’s father, her fiancé, appeared on what is
essentially a world stage at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul,
Minnesota. We also heard during that convention about Sarah Palin’s other children,
including a son heading off to the war in Iraq and another son, an infant born with
Down syndrome.
If nothing else it was newsworthy to examine the public discourse surrounding the
announcement of the pregnancy. When I say public discourse, I’m not referring to the
political pundits on cable news networks. I’m talking about ordinary people.
The New York Times did publish a thoughtful piece that described how in some circles
the news of Bristol’s pregnancy had reignited a “mommy war’’ in America, a culture
debate among women of all political persuasions and backgrounds about the balance
of work and family. The debate was over whether Palin could take on the demanding
job of leading the country with all that was happening in her own home. That story
had a mix of voices from all sides of the political spectrum, those supporting Palin,
those critical of her. And it did raise the question of whether a male candidate for vice
president would receive the same kind of examination. In my view, it was the kind of
fair and balanced story that didn’t necessarily focus on the candidate, or on the horse
race of the presidential campaign, but on the attitudes and culture of a nation.
The issue of fairness when it comes to politicians and family is not a partisan one.
Another candidate’s daughter came into the spotlight during the election season.
When Hillary Clinton was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president,
her 28-year-old daughter Chelsea Clinton was traveling around the country speaking
to young voters about her mother. The New York Senator’s daughter did not,
however, talk to reporters. It has been described as a longstanding tradition for U.S.
Presidents to ask journalists basically to stay clear of their children. When Chelsea
became the “first daughter’’ she was a child of just 13. Now, many years later, she has
put herself in the public eye, this time to send a message to voters.
At one point, while Chelsea Clinton was campaigning and taking questions from
students on an Indiana college campus, a student asked her about her mother’s
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handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. This, as you know, was a sex scandal
involving President Bill Clinton and a White House intern that led to the impeachment
of the President.
Chelsea Clinton reacted by telling the questioner it was none of his business, a
response that triggered a stampede of headlines and a debate over whether it is fair to
expect this now-grown woman who is stumping for her mother to continue to be
shielded from questions about her very public family.
If Chelsea Clinton has the right to assert her privacy, do journalists covering her
appearances then have to stop asking questions? To what extent are journalists under
an obligation to follow the rules that political figures make for themselves?
Sometimes how journalists ask questions can become a source of debate.
I want to go back once more to the example of Sarah Palin. When television news
anchor Katie Couric asked Governor Palin the now famous questions: 1) whether she
could name a Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade that she disagreed with and
2) what newspapers and magazines she read to keep abreast of the issues, the
governor’s awkward responses gained a lot of attention. Some people thought it was
unfair of Couric to ask the Vice Presidential candidate these questions. Most people, it
has been argued, cannot name a Supreme Court case they opposed. When Palin failed
to name a single news publication, was it ignorance or political self preservation that
colored her answer? Was Couric being unfair, or trying to trip up the governor—or
was she asking a candidate for the second highest position in the nation a legitimate
question about her breadth of knowledge?
One inevitable question that arises when it comes to striving for fairness and balance
has to do with the times in which we live. In newspapers it used to be that you’d come
into work in the morning, report a story, file it by the afternoon and then see your
story go through a few rounds of editing before being printed for the next day’s
edition. Today, of course, we live in the 24-hour news cycle in which news agencies
are now expected to inform readers in real time, at any moment of the day. Reporters
no longer have the luxury to make several rounds of calls to verify the facts when a
big story breaks or to wait until the circumstances surrounding an event become clear.
And this can be a very slippery slope.
When the actor Heath Ledger died suddenly in his SoHo apartment last January, news
outlets including the New York Times moved quickly to get the news online. Early in
the day, the Times’ City Room blog erroneously reported that Ledger died in an
apartment owned by the actress Mary-Kate Olsen. This account was based on an
official police source who later corrected himself, and so the draft of the story posted
online was changed. But it raised some important questions for journalists. Is it good
enough to go with what you’ve got until you find out who’s right and whose wrong?
On big stories that have perhaps greater consequence for a greater number people, can
you trust the reader to be paying attention when you do get the facts straight?
Striving for fairness and balance means being very careful, sometimes skeptical, about
where information is coming from. We live in an age when bloggers or “citizen
journalists’’ can post just about anything online, sometimes motivated by very
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personal biases. Sometimes an erroneous piece of information can take on a life of its
own.
The Los Angeles Times this year retracted a story that was based on fake FBI
documents linking the rap mogul Sean “Diddy’’ Combs to a 1994 attack on another
rap artist Tupac Shakur. The writer of the piece was a Pulitzer-prize winning
investigative journalist who acknowledged that he didn’t do his job in thoroughly
checking out the veracity of the documents. After his story appeared, one Web site
reported that in 1999 a Miami newspaper had published a profile of the reporter’s
main source that portrayed him as a con man.
This of course is an extreme case of a reporter being duped, but it’s not just something
that can happen to investigative reporters who cover big stories. What happened in
this case provides a good lesson for journalists at all levels as they gather information:
Consider the source every time. Does the person have an agenda or a grudge? Do they
have the authority to provide meaningful insight?
In America, many of the research organizations known as think-tanks, who help
illuminate the issues of the day—from immigration to the economy—sometimes have
a definite political stance—if not outright bias—that is important to point out in a
story. That is something that seems easy enough to do with a little homework, but we
reporters don’t always bother to do that. As a result, the reader is deprived of an
essential piece of information that would better help them interpret the analyses
offered by these organizations.
Some practical considerations come into play in the effort to be fair and balanced.
One of the basic tenets of journalism is to get both sides of any story. Even when the
naysayers, the critics and contrarians aren’t always as obvious or easy to reach as one
would hope.
Here again technology can be both friend and foe. As a municipal reporter I found
that I really had to make it my business to try to get home and cell phone numbers of
government officials I covered on my beats. And I learned not to rely on the normal
rules of etiquette that most people follow – specifically that one should only call
during normal workday hours. I learned that having a mayor or city commissioner
grumble a bit because I interrupted her dinner was much better than the outcry I might
cause later on if I didn’t try get the person’s side of things, especially if there were
accusations involved. And truthfully, it was rare that I did make anyone angry when I
called. Most people in the public eye expect this and know it is a part of the compact
they make for choosing their line of work.
But what about the private citizen, the person who, by accident or on purpose, finds
himself in the middle of a news event? Where does the sphere of privacy for that
person begin and end? What if those people are quite simply hard to reach for a whole
other set of reasons? What do you do when they shut you out?
Today in an age when people seem most comfortable doing all their talking by email,
or texting or instant messaging, it’s all too easy for a reporter to avoid the very
uncomfortable act of looking someone in the eye and asking that person a difficult
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question. But when those emails go unanswered and a key figure in a dispute is absent
from a story, the reporter cannot assume that the reader will know the reason for the
omission. To readers, it’s just a lop-sided story. Period.
I tell my students that they must tell readers precisely how many of their emails,
phone messages, and even how many visits to the person’s place of business or
perhaps to their home went ignored by the source. This full disclosure is the only way
to let the reader know that the reporter did everything in her power to get the other
side.
One of the things that makes this profession so exciting, so terrifying and, in many
ways, so vitally important, is just how much trouble you can cause by the simple act
of asking a question. Now, asking questions is something people do every day to
make decisions big and small about their lives. But when we as reporters ask
questions, the difference is that there can be so much more at stake. When we seek to
find answers, we know, or we should know, that we hold in our hands to power to
shape public attitudes, challenge the status quo, even transform lives, for better or for
worse.
Part of making the commitment as a journalist to strive for fairness and balance has to
do with who we you are and why you do this job in the first place. Is it to carry a
banner? Is it to become famous? Is it to make a difference? Or to find some kind of
affirmation?
Of course it is important to be a journalist with impact, but doing this job well can
mean living a lonely existence, one in which you please no one, maybe not even
yourself. In the end, you do what we all try to do and serve the one thing that matters
the most, the truth.
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