Things can get a little dicey when media begin mixing hard news and opinion.
The Daily Show is a great news/comedy show, and as host Jon Stewart pointed out on his Comedy Central program, during his most recent appearance at the end of June on Fox News, anchor Chris Wallace admitted that Fox shows "the other side" of the story. He said it in a context that news has two political sides, and liberal media show one side, skewering stories to the left, while Fox-whose motto is "fair and balanced"-must show the right-wing side of the story.
Basically he said Fox itself is not balanced. He meant his network skews stories to the right, which in turn, balances out other media outlets' coverage, which slants everything to the left.
This is pretty flawed reasoning. News sources are supposed to be unbiased when it comes to the story. Hard news is not supposed to be editorialized.
I had a teacher in college, a former reporter, who said Fox News' news coverage is pretty balanced but that their editorial is right wing, radiating a perceived bias. He may have been correct, but I think the network is now blurring the lines between what is hard news and what is editorialized, opinionated comment. I mean, Wallace outed the network completely.
Opinion pieces are important-this happens to be one-but their purpose is to drive conversation and get people thinking about how they look at an issue. Sometimes it's important to open oneself to a dissenting opinion, as many people simply prefer to hear about how their beliefs are justified.
For a news anchor to suggest that his network shows "the other side" of a story is a shocking thing for him to openly admit. That would be like an editorial in The Mercury saying that we only report news that sheds a good light on City council.
News sources shouldn't be trying to show things in a good light or a bad light. That same professor of mine would also say that reporters aren't after truth, they are after facts.
"Truth is determined in a court of law," he said. "Reporters want facts."
A hard-news story is meant to present indisputable facts. It's up to the reader to decide whether or not those facts show someone or some organization in a good way. A news organization isn't supposed to see news as being good or bad. It's just news. It's just fact.
When reporting on the illegal doings of the reporters at The News of the World, a story should reveal that reporters were being encouraged by superiors to tap into phone records of various people and bribe police for information. The story shouldn't say that the publication was wrong for doing so. The reader gets to make that decision. The story can report that arrests were made, which is a fact even though it may imply some wrongdoing, but again, the truth of the allegation is decided in the courts.
These 24-hour news television networks are now mixing their news and their editorial content because TV is all about entertainment, and nobody is entertained by news. They might be interested in news, but they aren't entertained. To keep viewers watching, these networks jump from the news story straight into a panel of analysts who then put their two cents in. That can make it difficult for the viewer to differentiate between the news and the opinion.
There is a time for analysis, but it has to be separate and clear that this is no longer news, this is just somebody's opinion.
