I was able to attend several journalism conferences within the last couple years and we talked a lot about how today the news is not so noble as it once was. The days of great reporters unearthing crime are over. Today news reporters have a bad rep. because they are usually biased and sometimes they get a little too nosy. Even news sources that claim to be unbiased still are put on by a certain group of people which makes it biased in the end anyway.
I've been thinking a lot about this as I have written my article on gay marriage and how it affects children. Every source I go to is, of course, bias. I find myself wondering how am I to pick out the real from the exaggerated, or the things that were hand selected out of a pool of information. For instance, one pro-same sex marriage book says that children of lesbians do just as well as they do in a single parent home, others simply say they do just as well as children with "heterosexual parents." Does that mean single heterosexual parents? Why can't they just come out and say it? Needless to say, that's been a source of frustration for me as I've written my paper.
Even MORE questions (answer any you choose):
Isn't honesty supposed to build your side up? That's why people loved the reporters of long ago- they were honest. How are you supposed to distinguish fact from fiction when it is so hard to find a piece of solid, unbiased information? Each piece of "information" is incomplete because it only shows one "angle." More importantly, how are you supposed to write an honest essay with the biased facts you do find? Are you being just as bad as the lying reporters by using information that might be corrupted (it's not your fault, you got the information from somewhere else, right?) or does using "facts" or "statistics" from each extreme strengthen your paper?
Lastly, is it really possible to have unbiased, written info considering everyone (the people who come up with the information) has his or her own personal convictions?
Just something to chew on... meanwhile, I challenge our class to write the most honest papers we possibly can given the most biased information in the world yet.
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"The Reporters of Long Ago"... How do you know they weren't just as bias as the ones today? It sounds like your romanticizing the past a little bit. What would a reporter then say in the paper about a homosexual man as opposed to what they would say now? Chances are they wouldn't even be able to report on the issue, hence where bias and social acceptability step into play. It's human nature to want to convince people that what you believe in is the only way. I don't think it is possible to not have an unbiased paper especially if you're trying to persuade someone to come around to your way of thinking, that automatically makes it biased. Now I'm not saying that you should use research that hasn't been properly tested or that isn't real, maybe your just not getting to the actual sources of documentation, but when you read something you're supposed to find out their rhetorical choices and dissect the piece to find out who the audience is and what they're trying to accomplish and so forth so that you can create your own opinion no matter what they're bias is. I bet if you did more research on actual studies done you could find more concrete information, but the topic itself, since humans are so different and the environment they're in is so unpredictable, it seems like there may not be one solid right answer, which shows the complexity of the issue you're writing about.
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