'FAIR AND BALANCED' JOURNALISM
No, this is not another rant about the Fox News' [sic] slogan. But I thought about it in relation to Samantha Power's excellent and Nobel Prize-winning A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide which I'm now reading. The current chapter deals with Saddam's genocide against the Kurds.

I suppose there's a lot in the book I could write about relating to current events, but I won't. Mainly, reading this material (written before 9/11) just underlines the bizarreness of the justification for the conquest of Iraq. In the 80s, Saddam was our ALLY in the war against Islamist extremism. By 2003, he was our ENEMY in the war against Islamist extremism. This depsite the fact that the nature of his regime hadn't really changed in that time period.

But what I'm writing about today isn't really about that. Since the Kurdish genocide occurred during the Iran-Iraq war, Power noted that genocide, or at least the magnitude of the horror, is quite frequently masked by the fog of war (Armenians, German Jews, Cambodians, Rwandan Tutsis). Power also observed that American press accounts of Saddam's gas attacks against the Kurds always gave disclaimers. "Iran claims that Iraq is gassing Kurdish areas." These disclaimers diminished the power of the story and American journalists weren't in the war zone at the time; and if they had been, they probably would've died too.

But it raising an interesting point about journalism and the difference between fairness and balance. This conundrum was discussed a lot by those who covered the war in the Balkans in the early 90s. By coincidence, Power got her journalistic start in that war for The Washington Post. The problem faced by Balkans' reporters was that their editors wanted them to be more balanced (neutral) but what they witnessed was the Serbs committing a disproprotionate amount of the atrocities. I don't think this was a new quandry in 1992. Perhaps it became more pointed with the end of the Cold War and its artificial distinctions accepted for so long ("Government X must commit horrible atrocities to save its country from horrible Communist atrocities" as though an innocent victim cares about the politics of his murderer).

One of the stated goals of mainstream journalism to be objective in reporting the news. Most journalists try to be objective. They may or may not succeed, depending on your opinion, but most try. However, even taking the Fox slogan at face value, I think fairness and balance are not the same thing.

Fairness implies objectivity. It involves investigating and reporting a story thoroughly regardless of where it might take you. It involves presenting a story in a way that reflects the totality of what you discovered. If, in a conflict, one of the sides is more guilty than the others, then fair reporting makes this clear. It doesn't say one side is guilty of everything. But it doesn't use qualifiers, disclaimers or other devices which somehow imply an equality of guilty.

Balance implies neutrality. Think of a scale. A BALANCED scale has the same weight on one side as another. Too many journalists think that balance equals fair. That if they quote Bill Clinton, then balance requires them to quote David Duke, because one's on the left of center and one's on the right. However, one's considered mainstream left and the other's considered far right. Is that fair? Further, many journalists think of this balance as a simple numbers game. Three canned quotes from standard "liberals" and three canned quotes from standard "conservatives" makes a fair story, or so we are lead to believe. If you have two decent "liberal" quotes and one excellent "conservative" quote, why play a pointless numbers' game? The goal is to inform, not satisfy an artificial quota.

A balanced account of World War II in Europe might consider stuff like the Holocaust and Nuremburg laws. But since that's two things, the account would have to find two bad things on the other side, to balance the numerical scale. So such an account might read, The Nazis killed 6 million Jews and shredded civil liberties but the Allies firebombed Dresden and some French collaborated with the occupying Germans.

The phrasing implies that these two sides' crimes are, if not equal, at least comparable. This might be neutral but is it objective? It may be balanced but is it fair?