Good reporting is not skewed by ideology.
Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides.
Good reporting is not about demonizing your perceived enemies while excessively praising your idols.
With all due respect, this strikes me as a middle school opinion on how media should work.
> Good reporting is not skewed by ideology.
You can't not have a perspective. You can be upfront about what your perspective is, while giving reasonable time to other perspectives.
> Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides.
Here I think the school-age lessons about what is fact and what is opinion does us all a massive disservice.
> Good reporting is not about demonizing your perceived enemies while excessively praising your idols.
If you can make a good argument supporting your demonization or praise, why not?
I believe you are wrong about what quality reporting is about. Journalism degraded because of the economic situation they find themselves in, but also because the school of journalism degraded. Maybe as a reaction to economic woes, but it certainly didn't not revolutionize the craft and instead did away with some quality aspects.
> school-age lessons
You could elaborate on this "argument", but we would probably disagree about the problems of modern journalism.
> If you can make a good argument supporting your demonization or praise, why not?
Because this is a more or less proof you didn't write an article to inform the reader and that you had other aspirations. You also lose the trust of your readers, but of course you always can work from the minima some papers find themselves in. Boulevard can be economically viable.
Be that as it may, to be a successful journalist is difficult today. And if you are too successful, you probably have a lot of enemies in your own trade.
Journalism isn’t getting one person to say it’s raining and one person to say it’s not raining. It’s to look out the window and report reality.
"Reality" is subjective and not always so easy to observe. What about political debates, economy, social issues? I don’t want to read a journal that tell me "this politician said that", but one that tells me _why_ they said it, in which context, if this is "right" or wrong, why, what does the other side says, etc.
(all of this thread resonates well with my last HN submission btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538847 )
You look out the window and see rain. I see light drizzle. A journalist writes about meeting a subject of his article in a "raging autumn storm".
Unfortunately, in today‘s world facts are interpreted as ideology. Take climate change: with the given scientific consensus you don’t need to „present all sides.“ A factually correct report will present the consensus. And still, some people will take this as „ideological.“
There is no "scientific consensus" on things like the Israel-Palestine war. It's incredibly difficult to be impartial on some of this type of issues.
You could say humanism is the absolute variable good journalists could stick to, but the Guardian seems to be going beyond that, deeper into the left ideology.
I'm still a big fan, regular reader and supporter of the Guardian, but I do at times skip over some of their more openly leftist pieces.
"Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides."
Nonsense. Good reporting is about carefully filtering the evidence and reporting the essential stuff. Sometimes that's heavily skewed to one "side" or the other. What's suspicious is when it's always the same side.
This is more precise but you probably mean the same thing. Just that discussion has degraded toward the idea that there are always political sides to every fact, the "everything is political" crowd.