Name: 第四課：平衡與公平 (Lesson 4: Balance and Fairness)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T11:13:40.000Z
Duration: 4 min 1 s
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Welcome to the World News from Al Jazeera News.

Media organizations often use words like balance and fairness.

They want to say that they're reporting without showing favoritism or making judgments.

Balance simply means giving equal time to both sides of an issue or not, giving one side more importance.

For example, let's consider a report about abortion bills winding their way through US legislatures.

A balanced report will give equal time to both supporters of abortion and those opposed to the procedure.

However, journalists must verify the facts put forth by each side.

It is not balanced to allow both sides to make any statement supporting their case.

This can perpetuate fake news and leaves the reader or viewer without solid information.

Will you just shut up for a minute and let me Teoh?

Shouting and arguing does not bring balance to an issue, and it certainly isn't journalism.

But journalists must be careful that seeking balance doesn't lead to unfair reporting or setting up an unfair moral equivalency or balance between unequal sides in an argument.

Actually, objectivity means reporting the truth.

It means getting everybody's truth and reporting it, but never creating a false moral equivalence.

Never saying all sides of equal because that's not the truth.

Its ally, journalist Christiane Amanpour, is talking about the Bosnian war, where she reported on attacks against Bosnian Muslims.

Experts called it a kind of ethnic cleansing to give equal weight to official denials of the violence she saw would have been wrong.

Fair reporting represents reality, not a simple, he said.

She said false moral equivalency is a failure of journalists to carry out their duties.

A smartnews consumer must ask, Is this coverage fair to the evidence?

 In less than five, we will explain how to evaluate news coverage in order to answer these questions. 