[Imc] Evaluating IMC work

[benjamin w harp]

While all socio-political news is biased, I think we should refrain from
biased rhetoric as much as possible.  We shouldn't write articles which
try to prove our viewpoint is right. What we should do is present
multiple sides of an issue, ones that are often overlooked by the
mainstream, as well as viewpoints which we disagree with.  We should do so
as fairly and precisely as possible.  And, let readers draw their own
conclusions.

Just because everything is biased, doesn't mean bias is OK.

Ben


On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Zachary C.Miller wrote:

> > The question seemed to be "do we slant, in response to their slant?"
> 
> I heard someone give a very interesting analysis of "objective
> journalism" at a WEFT meeting a while back. If whoever said this stuff
> is on this list I apologize for stealing your ideas!
> 
> Anyway the suggestion was that the very concept of "objective
> journalism" is a product of capitalism and profit motive. Big profits
> come from the economies of scale of mass media but you can't have mass
> media unless you have a mass audience and you can't build a mass
> audience unless your news is as thoughoughly homogenized,
> uncontroversial, and painless to digest as possible. 
> 
> Before the advent of mass media (supposedly) media was highly biased
> as each news outlet competed to carve out its political niche
> audience, journalists did ideological battle. But with
> industrialization and mass markets came the need to turn news
> production into an assembly line, mechanized, dehumanized,
> deemotionalized, rationalized process.
> 
> But of course this "rationalism" is only skin deep. We all know the
> mass media is "objective" on in so far as such objectivity doesn't
> question the capitalist system that it is based on and anything that
> _does_ question that system is declared "biased".
> 
> So we have to recognize two things, 1) corporate media is inherrently
> biased and 2) we don't have to fear bias because it is an inevitable
> byproduct of having humans write stories.
> 
> But of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't have integrity. Facts and
> numbers are always better than conjecture and rumors. Trustworthy
> checked sources are always good. And overly emotional rhetoric should
> be used sparingly, not because it betrays our "bias" but because its
> just bad style. We may have a slant but we aren't writing propaganda. 
> 
> These ideas were originally brought up to defend against claims that
> "Democracy Now" wasn't sufficiently "objective" to be worthy of WEFT
> airtime. I think that Amy Goodman's kind of slant is exactly what we
> should strive for actually. Amy occassionally gets a fact or two wrong
> because she's got a shoestring budget but she never gets them wrong
> on purpose. Amy's politics are clear from her content but it is not
> propaganda, it is well researched and grounded in facts, sources,
> numbers, and reality. So yes, lets sound and write like Amy
> Goodman. No, lets not sound and write like Dan Rather (corporate
> tool). Yes, lets write like Extra! and sound like CounterSpin. No,
> lets not write like Worker's Vanguard (leftist propaganda). Yes, lets
> sound and write like ourselves, each bringing our own unique "slant"
> and "bias" to our stories.
> 
> Just my thoughts. 
> 
> -- 
> Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/
> IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet
>  Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Feminism,
>  Sustainability, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy, Ecology
> Take it easy...but take it. - http://www.greens.org
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Imc mailing list
> Imc at lists.groogroo.com
> http://lists.groogroo.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/imc
>