Is it unrealistic to expect unbiased reporting?
Recently I was reading an article about 'perceived' bias in reporting. How we see bias, whether it is there or not, depending on which side of the political spectrum our opinions happen to fall.
It was asking the question of whether or not it is even realistic to expect total unbiased reporting? Reporters are just people and their own beliefs must at times slip into the way they report things, no matter how hard they may (or may not, as the case may be) try to not let that happen.
We all know some who wear their bias like a badge of honour, while others have a sort of covert bias. Do we pick and choose our 'facts' from our already held opinions and if we do, have we formed those opinions by only listening to the news outlets we have decided to trust, mainly because they seem to mirror those opinions? I admit to being more than a little guilty of that myself.
And then there is the relatively new 24hr news cycle which gave birth to 'click-bait', the sensationalising of headlines to get clicks. How often do we just skim the headlines, which so often have taken a couple of lines of a statement, usually out of context, coming from some politician, or another person in the limelight at the moment?
It quickly grabs our attention, as is the intention, and will often be shared on social media over and over again, not to mention the nightly news, with people making assumptions about the person making the statement based on their body language etc. Once we used to say that the camera doesn't lie, but we all know that isn't true anymore.
I can't find the article that ignited these thoughts now, so can't link it. It's probably just as well because it was very, very long and probably boring, but it was also, paradoxically, kind of interesting.
Maybe it even had some answers, if you could stick it out to the very end.
Which incidentally, I couldn't – and therein I guess, lies the problem.
May be a bit off topic but want to say that I think the media is much better at reporting facts these days than it was in the 1970s and before. We heard little in those days about the corruption of State governments like Joh Bjelke-Petersen in Qld and Robert Askin in NSW.