Policy Corner: The challenge of avoiding bias in choosing the day's top stories
I've written about how we subscribe to "wire" and other services for our state, national and international news. These services help guide what news we present to you in the Daily Herald.
But we must make the choices. Our selections are a big part of the pursuit of objectivity that I've written about.
The wire services - mostly The Associated Press and Washington Post - give us their lists each day of what they think are the biggest stories. But we don't always agree. And we know our readers don't, either; they often ask why some stories should be published at all - or why other things they've heard about aren't published.
The wire services aren't our only guide. We watch for stories of interest to our readers from any and every source. That includes cable news, the local news, national media online, even social media. Then we see if relevant stories are available to us.
We know many of these outlets are biased, explicitly in some cases and maybe inadvertently in others. The big cable news networks, for instance, can provide fair coverage of news, but especially as the night wears on, they definitely show a bias. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, all of them.
There are always occasions when sources people trust get it wrong or overplay their findings. The New York Times in 2016 excitedly broke a story that one year Trump declared a $916 million loss on his taxes, which meant he "could" have paid no taxes in the subsequent 18 years due to a loophole. But did he? (We still don't know.) It's interesting how such a large deduction could legally happen, but is it big breaking news?
Just last month, Fox News reported that "Clinton campaign paid to 'infiltrate' Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia, Durham finds." That's referring to Special Counsel John Durham. But among the problems with the story, Durham never used the word "infiltrate"; only an expert offering Fox News his opinion did. That brought claims of "spying," but that's not what Durham alleged; it's more nuanced and complicated.
In the end, we look for facts, relevance and fairness as we choose the stories to publish. It can be challenge indeed, but it's an important one.