When both side-ism becomes a betrayal of journalistic ethics

Ethical journalists are supposed to be objective in their coverage of news, not taking sides, and reporting things as they observe them. This is a high ideal, and one to which anyone involved in covering events should aspire, but the past decade, in particular since the election of Barack Obama, the first person of color to become president of the United States, the practice of giving equal weight and attention to all sides of issues has shown what I believe is a fatal flaw.

 

The term of art is both side-ism, or the practice of giving equal time to both sides of any issue. Works well in theory, but in practice, it has some fundamentally serious drawbacks.

 

In my opinion, there have probably always been flaws in the theory, but the drumbeat of ‘birtherism’ attacks unleashed by Donald Trump after Obama’s election, and the coverage given these attacks by the so-called mainstream media—with few of them (in the early stages at least) calling these attacks out for the false, racist screeds they were, illustrate the underlying weakness of giving equal weight to all sides of an issue without exception.

 

Trump, now under indictment on nearly a hundred charges of criminal actions and facing monumental civil liability in other cases, continues to strain the credulity of giving equal time to all views. When he uses Nazi terminology in a speech, he gets coverage, and again, few news organs call him out on it, and then they print his lame attempts to deny what he said without labeling this as another possible attempt at prevarication. He goes on a holiday rant on his personal social media platform, wishing his opponents and detractors would ‘rot in hell,’ and it gets massive coverage, with rather weak prose pointing out how distasteful this is, for anyone, but especially for someone campaigning to be leader of the country.

 

When the current president makes a mistake, it’s given equal coverage with the former president’s drumbeat of mistakes. The current leader’s age is discussed with the same weight, and sometimes even more, as the former president’s clinically obese condition. If Biden flubs a speech, gets a date wrong, it gets equal coverage with Trump’s inability to utter a complete sentence without mispronouncing a word or getting a simple fact wrong.

 

Journalists should be fair, but not just to the subjects of their articles, but the reading public. Readers have a right to know when what a politician is saying is untrue or just utter BS. Every word uttered by a politician, especially one who has a long-documented record of lying, does not deserve to be publicized.

 

Journalistic ethics means giving readers the information they need to make rational, informed decisions, and giving equal weight to both sides of an issue when one side is complete BS is not, in my humble opinion, ethical.

 

Est quod est.