The Six Forms of Media Bias?

David Leonardt of NYT has an interesting piece - The Six Forms of Media Bias -  in response to Margaret Sullivan's WaPo perspective article: "The media feel safest in the middle lane. Just ask Jeff Flake, John Kasich and Howard Schultz."

These articles properly address major problems of objective media political reporting, but miss the big picture. Leonardt organizes his piece around six elements, but in two of those - Centrist Bias and Liberal Bias, he notes the problem of bothsidesism, which is the correct point of focus.

Bothsidesism derives from an inability of political journalists to understand the difference between:

1. Fair and accurate reporting
2. Fair and balanced reporting

Balanced reporting can be inaccurate, and often is, especially if one "side" recognizes this media vulnerability and instinctively or, with calculation, act to exploit that weakness.

So, political reporters, so afraid of being wrong, now and then, practice bothsidesism, and wind up wrong more often than not.

The commitment to forced balance leads to these errors:

-If a full and objective analysis of facts would logically lead to dire conclusions regarding one "side" in our politics, especially if it is the other "side", these so-called "liberal" journalists soften their conclusions in order to maintain the appearance they are unbiased, but the result is bias against factual reporting in full context. Fox News does not have "Conservative bias" as Leonhardt writes. Fox News is a propaganda machine with enormous influence on viewers who like what they see and hear on the station. But Leonhardt can not say that. He says they "skew hard right" says nothing about their disregard of reality. They lie. Trump lies.

Fair and balance leads to
Forced balance, leads to
False balance,
False equivalencies

We need a new journalistic set of standards for political reporting with a commitment to objectivity and accuracy,  not so-called "fair and balanced" reporting. Fair and balanced implies the reporter is just a conveyor of facts without context. This has resulted in reporters who try to step back at all times to the "View from Nowhere" as Jay Rosen calls it, practice he said/she said journalism by default. They can not do otherwise under this regime. He said/she said political journalism favors the more aggressive politician, especially those who lie over those who tell the truth. Lying sends the political reporters into fact checking, which means they waste their time. Or they go running to the political opponent to ask - "he says this bad thing about you. What do you say about that?

"Bias for the new" is a big problem that is related to an inability to properly handle incremental changes to the status quo on important items. For example, the unbelievably significant interactions between Trump, his campaign, and Russia in 2015 and 2016 became public slowly over an extended period of time and the means of revelations was often manipulated by team Trump to soften the immediate blow to their credibility.  So, for example, Jeff Sessions sworn testimony to the Senate in his confirmation hearings that he was not aware of any contact with Russia was an absurd statement.

The solution to outdated standards of reporting for journalists is to step away from he said/she said reporting. Political journalists need to be like scientists - not referees, not judges. Instead of fair and balanced, be complete and accurate in context. Instead of horse race emphasis, turn to likely outcomes. We live in a world that is completely opposite to the world America would have inhabited if Clinton had won and Brexit had lost. But we did see much, if anything on that story in the he said/she said, false balance reporting of 2016.

Donald Trump is not an aberration. He represents the apotheosis of Republican political strategy of the last half century. Republicans are good at winning. Democrats are good at analyzing complex problems and designing complex solutions. Republicans succeed by dumbing down the debate to the lowest common denominator. Journalists have a duty to report this as fact, as the context for political debate, not as opinion.