Fair and Balanced vs. Honest and Accurate

We're all familiar with the irony that Fox News has adopted the term "fair and balanced" to describe news coverage that is anything but. But the larger issue that deserves more attention is that "fair and balanced" shouldn't be the goal of a news organization at all. As Jed Lewison explains at Daily Kos:

"[t]he media shouldn't feel any obligation to treat the disinformation campaign [surrounding the current health care debate] as it were a serious attempt at discourse. There's nothing wrong with calling liars liars....

What's really happening here is that Fox's screwball view of journalistic integrity ("fair and balanced" instead of "honest and accurate") has infected too many minds. Even if Fox weren't an overtly partisan network, the implication of the idea that news stories should be "fair and balanced" is that the primary goal of a news story is to serve the interests of subjects of the news report. ("We'll be fair to both sides in this story.")

The problem with that is that news stories aren't about serving the needs of their subjects. News stories should serve the needs of the reader. When people read news stories, they want to find out the truth, whether or not that has anything to do with the interests of any of the sides in a particular debate. Journalism should not be about giving fair treatment to the subjects of news reports, journalism should be about uncovering the real story, whatever it might be. Fairness and balance have nothing to do with it. If one side is telling most of the lies, you can't be balanced (as in "both sides are lying...") in reporting that fact. You can only be accurate -- and that's all that reasonable people should ask.