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We need a real conversation about journalism & bias. There’s a veneer of so-called objectivity when there really is no such thing which is being revealed in some recent anti-poverty coverage and the way racialized politicians are covered. How should we understand reporter bias?
I’m not saying bias is always bad or wrong, but I am saying reporters are real people with their own values and opinions and lived experience. Their identities matter.
I’ve had a bee in my bonnet about this story since it emerged. Why? Because this story invisiblized race, language, and culture. This story actually involved South Asian households for whom political symbols are important. https://www.newwestrecord.ca/opinion/blogs/new-west-politics-orange-is-the-new-outrage-1.23448536
But if we don’t have reporters who can speak the language of the people being reported on and don’t understand cultural context then how are we telling the right story? Who is in our newsrooms matters. They control our public narratives.
And to be clear, this isn’t meant to be a dunk on @shinebox44. We’ve had a long conversation about diversity in newsrooms and I can understand the real challenges faced by local papers and local reporters. And I believe this is part of a deeper problem with news reporting.
Another instance was a reporter apparently speaking both as a voter and as a reporter in this thread (and his tweets since deleted for some reason). https://twitter.com/nadinenakagawa/status/1301633135109500928
Should we then understand his reporting to be his views as a voter? I would say we always should. Because the idea that we can separate these things is ridiculous.
All of this rambling to say that opinion and reporting have been blended in a way that is both problematic (because how do we tell them apart) but also in way that I think is more accurate to reality - reporting always had a dose of opinion.
It always had a dose of opinion because what stories were covered, who was quoted, the language we used to talk about issues - these are all choices. There is no such thing as objectivity. Ever. In any discipline.
