Answering the question of `bias’
Watertown newspaper to begin delivery by U.S, Postal Service
The Front Page
Morning Update
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
By Ken Tingley
A week later, the question still bothers me. Not because it was asked, but because I didn’t answer it very well.
Will Doolittle and I had been on the stage at Crandall Public Library for more than an hour when we started the question and answer portion of the program about our careers in newspapers. The Q&A is always a great chance to hear what is on the minds of the audience.
One man asked about partisan reporting in newspapers. He explained he had read the same story in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and he believed one story was more biased than the other.
I believe I told him he needed to be careful because if you are looking for bias in a story, you will almost always find it.
Both Will and I insisted these two news outlets may have dramatically different philosophies on their “Opinion” pages, but they were both highly respected news outlets with reporters that tell it straight.
The man insisted otherwise.
The question lingered in my subconscious over the next few days because it is an extremely important question these days. I repeatedly mulled it over, wondering how I could have answered the question better.
I wondered if I needed to address the “trust” issue in the media.
Sometimes when readers accused my newspaper of “bias,” I would ask what we had to gain from not telling the truth. After all, that was our calling card - truth and accuracy. If we could not be trusted, why would someone pay for our product?
Lying - especially intentionally - put our whole business model at risk.
I wanted to tell the man that in my 40 years at five different newspapers, I did not recall one instance of anyone lying intentionally to forward their own way of thinking. In fact, for the most part newsroom discussions rarely were about our own personal views. I always marveled how little I knew about where staff members stood politically.
I wanted to assure the man that the past two or three decades of news gathering had been a high point of journalism in our country with most news outlets having strong ethics guidelines that held reporters and editors accountable for their actions.
Being biased in news stories would get you fired.
Newspapers regularly ran corrections and explanations of how mistakes happen in their news reporting.It is something you rarely see on television. They religiously tried to be transparent.
But maybe the most important thing is that if we don’t believe the reporters who report daily about news, then who do we trust?
The politicians?
What we read on social media?
Hopefully, I will be better prepared the next time the question is asked because I know it will be asked again.
Watertown to mail paper
The Watertown Daily Times announced last week it had made a “pivotal” change in how its newspaper is delivered. Beginning on June 21, the newspaper will be delivered by the U.S. Postal Service for home subscribers while still being available in the morning on newsstands.
Publisher/Editor Alec Johnson promised the newspaper would be delivered the same day it is published. The newspapers will not go to the postal service hub in Syracuse. Its Sunday newspaper will now be delivered on Saturday as a weekend edition.
“We are making this change because it is necessary to provide a stable, consistent delivery of the newspaper to subscribers,” Johnson wrote to readers. “That has become more difficult as routes have been open and it has been a challenge to find new carriers to fill them. And now the price of gas has made it more challenging. We have gratitude for the legions of carriers who have delivered our newspaper to readers for decades.”
This new delivery model is a first for me. I imagine many readers will be frustrated by not getting the newspaper first thing in the morning, but hopefully they will value it enough to to remain subscribers.
Stefanik targeted
North Country Public Radio reported last week that “The Lincoln Project,” an anti-Trump Republican group has paid $170,000 for an ad criticizing Rep. Elise Stefanik as “ruthless,” “back-stabbing,” and “evil” for her Facebook ads advocating a version of a white supremacist conspiracy theory.
The ads will be seen in the Watertown, N.Y. market as well as New York City, Washington, D.C. and Boston. The ads also criticized companies like Home Depot for continuing to send Stefanik campaign contributions.
Social media concerns
North Country Public Radio also reported last week on the gathering of over 100 parents in St. Lawrence County to discuss concerns about social media after three children had died - two by suicide and one by accidental choking.
The meeting was sparked after the death of a seventh grader in Canton who accidentally choked to death after attempting a social media challenge.
Tweet of the Day
Sadly, I've become aware that many people read newspapers for entertainment, not information, and that warps all judgements about accuracy, fairness and bias. (And as an aside: judging by their decreasing numbers, the comics -- where wisdom is commonplace -- are dwindling in popularity.)
There is good cause for concern, because bias is a tricky thing, especially in these days when so many people conflate their opinion with facts. I think the toughest to deal with is implicit bias, the sort we don't know is there because it's built on our observations and experiences from birth; it's the way we navigate the world and make our unconscious decisions. That becomes a problem when the choices we make unwittingly cause harm or pain, and if it bleeds over into news reporting, the impact is amplified. In my experience, if someone tells me there is bias, they're probably right and I need to look deeper to identify it.