Whoever said that news had to be fair and balanced? I understand fair but I do not understand balance. Is that a central tenet of journalism? According to Wikipedia:

Grade the News, an American website, identified seven yardsticks on the basis of which it judges the standards of some local media houses’ news quality. These yardsticks are newsworthiness, context, explanation, local relevance, civic contribution, enterprise and fairness.^[7]

Here’s are three standards of journalism that Wikipedia reports as a professional and ethical ones:

• Find and report every side of a story possible;
• Report without bias, illustrating many aspects of a conflict rather than siding with one;
• Approach researching and reporting a story with a balance between objectivity and skepticism.

So, there’s that word, “balance.” But it is not in reference to finding balance between the two sides of a story. Also, is the requirement to be unbiased, stating that all sides of the story must be reported on. That, however, does not imply that all sides of the story are equally valid or equally correct. Just that they exist.

“Balance,” on the other hand implies that both sides of the story are equal. But, they are equal only in that they must both be reported on, not that they both hold equal importance, value, or correctness.

Where am I going with this? I think you can guess. Fox News prides itself on being “Fair and Balanced.” Also, many conservatives in the US complain about the media being biased towards Obama and the left. They complain that the news isn’t being balanced enough. A site called OneNewsNow asks in an article headline, “News media in bed with Obama?” (This tactic, by the way, is somehow acceptable. The idea that because there is a question mark at the end of the headline makes it unbiased, is backhanded and sneaky. Of course, that headline without the question mark would be biased. But this one isn’t.) In the article, it reads:

An analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that 57 percent of the print and broadcast stories about John McCain since the political conventions were decidedly negative, while only 14 percent were positive. The study concludes that 29 percent of the mainstream media’s coverage of Barack Obama was negative.

Who got the idea that fair (and balanced) means that there must be equal percentages of positive and negative reporting done on “both sides of the story,” or in this case, both opposing candidates? This is just ludicrous and delusional. How is it possible that McCain and Obama would happen do and say the equal percentage of things that could be reported on as positive and negative.

I am going to make an example but I don’t want to draw comparisons to either of the candidates. I just want to show an example why the news cannot and should not be balanced.

Take a simplified murder case. There is a shooting in a neighborhood where there are two people involved in a fight, guns are drawn, shots are fired, and an innocent 6-year-old girl is shot dead. Assume these are the facts of the case and cannot be disputed. Now, how is it possible that all sides of this story are balanced? Would Fox News ask us to report equally positively and negatively on the participants of the fight and the innocent bystander? Is there any way that we could find as many negative things to say about the young dead  girl as we could about the shooter? If there is, please let me know. We can report on all of the facts of this case, but there is no way that we could report that the girl is equally as “negative” as her killer. In some (most) cases, that would be impossible.

This is a mathematical approach to proof. If we can show one case where where being “balanced” is impossible, then there is no was to assert that all reports must be balanced. Therefore we cannot ask reporting on anything, including the presidential race to be balanced in that way.

So, to all the complainers, drop this idea that news needs to be balanced.