We Can't Have an Impartial Media
Sorry, Jon Stewart.
Jon Stewart, formerly the host of The Daily Show and now The Problem with Jon Stewart, would like us to have an impartial media that only tells us what’s going on in the country.
He’s actually not wrong. We should have an impartial media complex. We should be able to just read the news and see what’s going on in the world around us. But the theory of an impartial media complex is thwarted by one simple fact: We’re all human. We will write the news and we will interpret the news differently each and every time we see it.
On Thursday’s episode of The Problem with Jon Stewart, he said, “there are ways to bolster democracy that are not just about covering how voting is under threat.” “What if the media were focused actually not on political ramifications but on governance? It strikes me that the media almost ignores governance,” Stewart said.
Stewart posited these thoughts to the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan, who responded with this:
Sullivan agreed, saying, “that’s why I’d like to see- we always hear a lot about political reporting, it would be so great if it were redefined as actually ‘government reporting’, which is what it’s supposed to be. So less about the palace intrigue, and less about the horse race of one campaign or another. You know, ‘who’s ahead’ and ‘what if this happens?’ and more about what’s going on.”
“I think we kind of underestimate the interest and the intelligence of the public when we don’t do that. I actually think there’s- people do care about the democracy,” Sullivan said. “Some people talk about a ‘citizens agenda’. What’s the citizen agenda? What would actually be good for the citizens of the United States? What do they need to know about?”
The problem is that the media is made up entirely of people, all of whom have their own views and agendas. Most of the media lean to the left. They are naturally more critical of Republicans and conservatives than they are of Democrats and progressives. That led to the rise of Fox News and conservative outlets, all of which do the opposite.
So when you’re trying to see how the government is run and what it is doing and needs to do, what you’re getting is that information through the filters of those naturally biased reporters. Some of them have a limited or barely noticeable bias. Others are all-in on choosing one side or another. At the business level of journalism, audience size and reaction are at the heart of how you fine-tune your coverage.
You can teach objective journalism at journalism schools (and some do try), but you won’t eliminate the natural biases of journalists. Those biases will be part of their reporting. It makes the job of reporting on strictly governance nearly impossible. You are naturally drawn in to covering it the way you feel it should be covered.
But, the other side of this is that the horse race stuff - the polling, the politics, the talking points - are also just as vital.
See, politicians need to know what the public thinks about what they’re doing. And the people deserve to know the deals being cut and when their politicians are choosing a side or flipping a position and why. If you like a politician and want to see them continue to succeed, you will inevitably need to understand that they have to compromise and sometimes cut deals. They are deals that will almost always help with their re-election efforts in the long run (though there are a good number of deals that are poorly calculated and lead to the opposite happening), and they matter because keeping a good politician in office means more time to get good things done.
If you’re passionate about an issue, and you want to see maximum success on it, you don’t elect a politician who will go for broke, ruffle too many feathers, and lose power before the issue is solved. You want someone who can move the ball down the field.
So Stewart, who is far more socially and fiscally liberal than I am, wants to see issues A, B, C, and D get done in Congress and signed by Joe Biden. I want to see those issues defeated by the Republicans. What we both want, then, is for our sides to come away with a victory. The ideal for us is that we manage 100 percent of our goals. The reality, though, is that we can much more easily achieve 50-60 percent of our goals if our politicians were to work on a compromise. I hate Issue B the most and he wants to see Issue D really pass. He can drop his push for Issue B if it means I come to terms with Issue D passing.
But both sides are now in full extreme mode. They want to get rid of all things they don’t like and only allow things they do like, which means Stewart and I would both be unhappy in this scenario because nothing we’d like to see done actually gets done.
But while we can’t have an impartial media that covers this, what we really do need is better argumentation teaching in our schools. We need to teach kids not just how to research opposing views but also how to determine the obvious bias and navigate to the truth in any story, no matter who publishes it. We need to do better.
Partially because I’m not sure the media can do better.
Not to mention that partisanship is more lucrative than objectivity.