the Times had a report today<\/a> about a spat between a journalism professor and Cavuto, who is widely considered one of the least neutral on-air “journalists” in America. When the unidentified professor argued that Cavuto had “abandoned objectivity for overt nationalism” during the war, it apparently touched a nerve.<\/p>\nFirst, in typical Fox News style, Cavuto lashed out with the kind of dignity and class one has come to expect from the network, calling the professor an “obnoxious, pontificating jerk, self-absorbed, condescending imbecile, Ivy League intellectual Lilliputian.” Jeez Cavuto, why don’t you tell us what you really think.<\/p>\n
More importantly, Cavuto responded to the suggestion that he doesn’t maintain on-air neutrality.<\/p>\n
“So am I slanted and biased?” Cavuto said. “You…bet I am, professor. I’m more in favor of a system that lets me say what I’m saying here rather than one which would be killing me for doing the same thing over there [in Iraq]. You say I wear my biases on my sleeve? Better that than pretend you have none.”<\/p>\n
On the one hand, I found it interesting that someone who purports to be a journalist would freely acknowledge a bias during a broadcast. Cavuto was more or less admitting that the professor — who, in Cavuto’s words, is an “imbecile” — was right.<\/p>\n
But the point about showing biases openly, as opposed “pretending you have none” was also intriguing. Does Cavuto have a point? Is it better for the news-consuming public to know where their journalists are coming from ideologically as they read\/see\/hear the news?<\/p>\n
I would argue not. Cavuto’s error, as I see it, is confusing having opinions with having biases. I’ve worked with a number of journalists in my professional life and I’ve seen first hand that they’re human beings. They can’t help but form their own ideas about the story and the personalities they are covering. There’s nothing wrong with that.<\/p>\n
The readers\/viewers who rely on these journalists for accurate reporting, however, don’t need to know these opinions; they’re not relevant to the process. They only become relevant if the professional (and his or her editors\/producers) allows these opinions to shape and\/or distort the news.<\/p>\n
Opinions are the natural outgrowth of an intelligent person considering multiple sides of an issue. Biases, however, reflect a problem for the field of journalism by prejudicing the news. People who are relying on objectivity are inherently misled by networks\/publications by the nature of these predispositions. Objectivity is the most important quality in journalism. This doesn’t mean abandoning opinions, it means providing news without a bias.<\/p>\n
Fox News Channel used to advertise its network with the slogan, “We Report, You Decide.” Cavuto was unintentionally demonstrating just how ridiculous the slogan is for a network that proudly wants to offer viewers a specific ideological perspective, in this case, a conservative one. Cavuto, by embracing the fact that he is, in his own words “slanted and biased,” is turning the very idea of “We Report, You Decide” on its head. By boasting of his prejudices, Cavuto has adopted the role of advocate while abandoning the role of journalist.<\/p>\n
The Fox News Channel’s ratings may be high, but their professional standards can’t get much lower.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Washington Times, DC’s unabashedly right-wing newspaper, had an interesting item about Fox News anchorman Neil Cavuto today. (For those of you unfamiliar with the Times, it’s a newspaper only in the loosest sense. It doesn’t even pretend to objective. It is a conservative publication by design, written by conservatives for a conservative audience. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}