{"id":5012,"date":"2014-03-15T19:48:45","date_gmt":"2014-03-15T19:48:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/?p=5012"},"modified":"2014-03-15T19:48:45","modified_gmt":"2014-03-15T19:48:45","slug":"wheres-the-fairness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=5012","title":{"rendered":"Where's the fairness?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Good journalism — be it print or broadcast — relies on relatively few basic tenets.<\/p>\n

Accuracy is one. Thoroughness is another. So is fairness.<\/p>\n

And fairness requires that you seek out both sides of a dispute, such as one that recently erupted in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Chairman Darrell Issa, a Republican, shut down a hearing as the ranking Democrat, Elijah Cummings, sought to pose a question of Lois Lerner, an Internal Revenue Service official at the center of a controversy that some folks want to turn into a full-blown scandal.<\/p>\n

The IRS has been criticized for its vetting of conservative political action groups seeking tax-exempt status. What the right-wingers don’t acknowledge, of course, is that the IRS does the same thing to liberal groups.<\/p>\n

Back to journalism’s fairness tenet.<\/p>\n

The Rev. Al Sharpton — a liberal MSBNC talk show host — interviewed Cummings the other day to get his side of the story. One liberal would “interview” another liberal.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Issa was making the rounds on the Fox News Channel to give his<\/em> version of events. Conservatives were “interviewing” a conservative.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/photo.php?fbid=848447285170595&set=a.290068127675183.91261.280920811923248&type=1&theater<\/p>\n

My strong preference would be for Cummings to talk to the Fox guys and Issa to talk to the MSNBC guys. Let the liberal news\/commentary network get the other side’s version of a controversy and have the conservative network get the liberal’s version of events.<\/p>\n

That’s one way to define — if I can borrow a phrase — a “fair and balanced” approach to journalism.<\/p>\n\n

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Good journalism — be it print or broadcast — relies on relatively few basic tenets. Accuracy is one. Thoroughness is another. So is fairness. And fairness requires that you seek out both sides of a dispute, such as one that recently erupted in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Chairman Darrell Issa, a Republican, … Continue reading Where's the fairness?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[220,1260,1553,1790,3155],"class_list":["post-5012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-al-sharpton","tag-darrell-issa","tag-elijah-cummings","tag-fox-news-channel","tag-msnbc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}