George Rebane
‘Legitimate’, ‘credible’, ‘impartial’, ‘biased’ are labels hung on news sources. These days with fake news flooding the web and other channels, different people append such labels to news sources with which they agree or not. And often they do it with little thought given to what those labels really mean, thereby increasing the heat and confusion in any subsequent dialogue. So let’s get these monikers for news sources straight in our minds –
- Legitimate – true to an established AND known set of standards/rules/protocols that constrain what and how they can report something.
- Credible – having established and continuing to maintain the reputation of being factually correct.
- Impartial – evincing no clear partisan flavor or favoritism in their published syntax.
- Biased – evincing an obvious partisan leaning or position regarding what they choose to publish, and what syntax to use in their reporting.
The amount of semantic orthogonality of these labels should become clear with a little thought. For example, credible sources may also be biased or impartial. Legitimate sources may or not be credible and/or biased, and so on. More specifically, the same credible and factually correct event may be reported by various non/partisan sources as –
- Leftwing: ‘Hillary Clinton confirmed that she had deleted no work-related files.’
- Impartial: ‘Hillary Clinton stated that she had deleted no work-related files.’
- Rightwing: ‘Hillary Clinton claimed that she had deleted no work-related files.’
Or regarding the 6jul17 NPR report – “Trump pointedly omitted mentioning NATO’s Article 5 during his last trip through Europe.” Compared to an impartial ‘Trump’s remarks did not include NATO’s Article 5 in his last trip to Europe.’
[7jul17 update] To overwhelm you with examples of ideologically biased reporting, take a look at any article from this list of Politico pieces on leak investigations in light of the above discussion. There you will learn that what the Trump administration is really doing is stifling “in-depth reporting” by launching numerous leak investigations by the FBI and other national security units of the federal government (in addition to Congress).
According to Politico’s progressive reporters, in-depth reporting requires criminal leaks of national security compromising allegations from anonymous and surreptitious sources labeled simply as “high level official in (fill in name of bureau)”, “former (fill in name of bureau) official”, … . So now Politico accuses President Trump of “creating fear” of what it calls “witch hunts” when national security organizations are conducting their own leak probes and revising need-to-know policies to limit and identify staffers who are privy to certain areas of classified information. Bottom line – national security compromising criminality is a fundamental component, if not an outright First Amendment right, of progressive journalism.
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