“What Is ‘Fair and Balanced’?” Well, it’s a great question that is, at the same time, the wrong question.

“Fair and Balanced” — and “Honest and Transparent”, a suggested substitute — don’t describe the necessary relationship between reporter and reader. More appropriate is to be both “accurate and useful.” While fair, balanced, honest, transparent all may be worthwhile in context, they are incidental to “accurate and useful.”

The reporter’s only job is to serve as a surrogate for the reader. The reporter helps the reader refine his mental map of reality. One’s mental map is the only tool available to plan one’s better future. When the reporter fails, the map is skewed. It becomes neither accurate nor useful.

The yardstick of journalism is how succinctly a distillation represents what needs to be known about what actually occurred. That is why “journalist” is an earned accolade — earned fresh each day. And it’s why, as a newspaper publisher, I don’t tell recruits to be fair, balanced, honest, or transparent. I put the integrity of the process on their honor. I tell them, “Write so that tomorrow you’ll feel proud about what you wrote today.”

Reporting is not so easy as it seems, because all journalism operates like a magnifying lens, distorting what is covered simply by the covering of it. Good journalism minimizes distortion.

The attributes initially suggested confuse the issue. “Unfair” and “unbalanced” are charges laid by those who are written about and who mistakenly assume that any map of reality should represent them as they want to be seen. Sorry, that’s not the job of journalism. To whom should one be honest — the subject of the story, the reporter, or the reader? And one can be extremely transparent and still botch the reporting.

Yes, many want to make journalism better, but that is complicated when so many don’t understand the first purpose of journalism — to help refine, accurately and usefully, the reader’s mental map of reality.

My added thought is this: I think the prevailing culture among PJM bloggers should be one of “respectfulness”, or “civility”. It should be unacceptable to belittle or browbeat another blogger (make disparaging remarks, attack personally) in the course of taking an opposing view. The all-around discourse will better if that is part of the expectation.

OT Re the House of Saud I tend to agree with you. See my comment in another thread on this site:

Lin k Here

thats my slogan

Expect no moral inversion

See my post about his de-certification of the press.

Every policy has good results, and bad results — and every proposal should change the likelihood of getting such results.

News has been failing at educating people about the fact that policy changes are an attempt to change the probabilities of results. Such a complex concept is not a 30 second sound bite. But how a policy affects the future is what keeps so many interested in the “news” as infotainment.

Where does the Leftist MSM keep track of Kerry’s failure to sign and deliver his Form 180? (Which, on Jay’s site, is not-to-be-named.)

The book told of a county fair at the turn of the last century. A very fine bull was the prize for a contest in which people guessed the bull’s weight. The one closest to the correct weight would, of course, win. Several hundred people submitted their guesses. None was even close to right, although someone was certainly close enough to walk off with the bull as a prize.

What was interesting was what happened afterwards. A mathematician got hold of all of the hundreds of slips of paper submitted, each with a guess as to the bull’s weight. He added them up, divided them by the number of guesses, and arrived at an average that was within a mere 2 pounds of the bull’s actual weight.

The story, of course, illustrates the innate wisdom of crowds (something we bow to every time we convene a jury). In the wild and woolly world that is the blogosphere, I don’t think we can set a single standard for fair and balanced. Indeed, I don’t think we want to. Once you start setting standards, you also incrementally start imposing viewpoints and begin to stifle ideas. It is the variety of views made available in the blogosphere, amongst the many and varied pajama pundits, that leads to an average that is probably correct. This pure marketplace of ideas is probably the best crucible we can off to burn off the dross and reveal some semblance of truth.

Facts; elusive things not of any real value unless you are an actuarial. So Walter said what he thought and left out what he did not find interesting or relevant and he presented it in a serious and dedicated fashion.

The blogoshere presents a view of the conditions that produce the facts that people quote but has no real ability to offer a factual report.

So I say lets find people that we trust who are the sole representatives of their organisation for accumulating news and leave it to them. Eventually the pale representation of what really happened will come out but in the meantime we at least can hear that something in fact has happened and form our own value judgement while awaiting the ultimate accumulation of information that tells the story.

I don’t remmember him ever assigning a political affiliation to his point of view; thank God.

Edward R. Murrow would do also.

Maybe the lack of armies of PR people has something to do with it.