June 15, 2000
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In spite of the difficulties, I still think there's hope. Most of the distortion that occurs isn't due to a concerted conspiratorial effort; it's just that the devil's in the details. If you know how the system works, you can fix some of those details.
For the most part, most journalists do not genuinely start a story with a conscious motivation of favoring one side or another in some controversial issue. You'll probably just have to take my word for this, but most journalists actually do want to be fair to most of the people they interview. Unfortunately, journalists can be sloppy, or uninformed, or too rushed by a deadline or too constrained by a word count to get the story right. Also, some journalists are stupid. This isn't such an optimistic picture, but it does mean that since journalists aren't actually trying to distort these issues, there are ways to help them get a clearer understanding that they will appreciate.
There's really no such thing as objective news. It's a lie that journalists cling to because it makes our lives easier, and it's a lie that the public is mostly happy to swallow because it means they don't have to go to the trouble of being skeptical.
Bias can and will enter into a story in a hundred different ways, and one way is that if the journalist genuinely likes you as a person, nine times out of ten it'll reflect positively on your side of the story. If you come across as dismissive or elitist, it's not going to reflect well on what you say. But if you come across as open and helpful, it probably will.
A lot of media skills, then, consists of learning how to do some of the work for the journalist. It is extremely effective to present the relevant pieces of the story for the journalist to digest and spit out with minimal effort on eir part.
This is not fair. In an ideal world, maybe a world where the media wasn't driven by a profit motive, where the public had more time and courage in their choices of information, each journalist would have the luxury of really learning about each issue e writes about, and of presenting a complex story that matches a complex reality. This is not that ideal world. And you shouldn't have to do work for journalists.
But consider this: Any large public or private organization, from the Justice Department to the Motion Picture Association of America, hires people who do exactly this as a full-time job. They're called Public Relations, and much of what they do involves trying to be helpful to media in a way that will help the side they represent. If you go against them in a public forum, you will have to learn to play the game at that level.
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