Monthly Archives: November 2021

Journalism schools teach that correct news reporting must answer: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How- the five W’s and one H.
News Coverage includes unbiased and neutral facts as different from Opinion or Commentary which gives the writer’s biased opinion. Nearly all News organizations and reporters claim to report unbiased facts from a neutral viewpoint.
My Shopper Science and Digital Briefs column– when reporting just science and technology– has always been simple facts without bias—there’s not any way to bias scientific facts.
But I, Dave the Shopper Editor, too wish I could claim my recent columns, even the ones moving heavily into politics, are unbiased, just facts.
But I know in politics my columns have been very biased. I admit that I am biased, a Christian, a Conservative and a Republican (even though some call me a RINO, “Republican in Name Only,” because I advocate vaccination and believe in global warming.
The Covering Both Sides articles below are the opinions of real (unlike me) journalists about the challenges in being unbiased.

Covering both sides
From National Review by Judson Berger, October 22, 2021:
“This is J school 101: You get the five W’s, maybe the H if you’re dog-tired, avoided libeling anyone, avoided copying anyone and favored inverted-pyramid style and presented both sides.
“’Did you reach out for comment?’ It’s a question this recovering newsie has been asked countless times by editors and anxious in-house lawyers. The answer damn well better be yes.
“But the media’s task of covering both sides is one that’s being progressively abandoned in some influential quarters, on issues as genuinely contested as congressional spending and voting laws. Some would reduce coverage — not commentary, but news coverage — of these issues to battles of right versus wrong. That’s not how this is supposed to work.
“Earlier this week, NR’s Brittany Bernstein and Isaac Schorr highlighted the latest out-in-the-open push to advocate journalism elevating one side over the other. A Los Angeles Times column, cheered on in the Twittersphere, voiced con-cern that journalists and pundits would “focus critically on President Biden and Democrats” without highlighting “Republicans’ obstructions.” (Obstruction magically be-comes less of a crisis when power changes hands.)
“Jackie Calmes wrote: ‘Democrats can’t be expected to deal with these guys like they’re on the level. Nor should journalists cover them as if they are.’
“Well, then. It was one of those quiet-part-out-loud moments. Another came when House speaker Nancy Pelosi openly scolded the media for not doing a good-enough job ‘selling’ the reconciliation bill.
“Here at National Review, we’re comfortable saying the loud part loud: We’re an ideological organization. You know that. But we don’t let it blind us as we go about our coverage or our commentary. We’ll call balls and strikes on the Republican side (see here and here), and we’ll do the same when news outlets start asserting opinion and sometimes just-plain falsities as fact, in service of one side. See here.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/both-sides-matter/

Covering both sides II
Here from The Media Institute, posted way back on August 15, 2013 by Patrick Maines
“Opinion Journalism vs. Objective News Reporting
“The rise of opinion journal-ism, not just among cable and the newer media but elements of the legacy media as well, magnifies the problem of the dearth of objective news reporting. About five years ago even the Associated Press announced a turn to-ward opinion, euphemistically referred to as ‘accountability journalism,’ while the Washing-ton Post and the New York Times have for years now been foundering in the stuff.
“Makes one wonder where to turn (outside, perhaps, of the business and financial journals) for investigative and feature news that is not in service to some political party, ideology, or special interest.
“And what a loss! At the very moment that this country desperately needs an independent, credible, and objective press to describe and chronicle the country’s manifest economic problems, there’s practically nobody in the Fourth Estate who commands widespread trust and re-spect.”

https://www.mediacompolicy.org/2013/08/15/opinion-journalism-vs-objective-news-reporting/

Covering both sides III
Here by- again- Judson Berger of National Review one week later on October 29, 2021.
“We can see the casual disregard for freedom of speech seep-ing into American life, not just in polls but in the recent DOJ letter warning of an FBI crack-down on protesting parents. Andrew McCarthy asked on these pages last weekend whether we have freedom of speech to the degree we thought.
“’Whether freedom of speech truly exists is a cultural question, not a legal one. It hinges on the society’s commitment to liberty as something that is lived, not merely spoken of,’ he wrote, making that same observation above about freedoms reflecting values.
“What does our culture value? One recent survey found that a majority of college students support shouting down speakers with whom they disagree; 23 percent supported the use of violence toward this end. At some colleges, the percentage supporting such violence crept into the 40s.
“That is not a culture that values free speech.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/what-happens-when-free-speech-dies/

We can help train NASA’s rovers to better explore Mars
We can identify non-random shapes in thousands of fine-resolution Mars photos to help NASA see shapes that might need further investigation.
Members of the public can help teach an artificial intelligence algorithm to recognize scientific features in images taken by NASA’s Perseverance.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, has enormous potential to change the way NASA’s space-craft study the universe. But because all machine learning algorithms require training from humans, a recent project asks members of the public to label features of scientific interest in imagery taken by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.
The project is the continuation of one launched last year that resulted in an algorithm that could identify these features correctly nearly 98% of the time.

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-nasa-rovers-explore-mars.html

Dave Bunting, Nov. 1, 2021
References in links below items.
See these columns on my blog: daverant.com