To: Kathy English, Public Editor, publiced@thestar.ca
re: “Mideast coverage: We can’t win”, by Kathy English, January 17, 2009
Dear Ms. English,
I truly appreciated reading your article on the Middle East reporting. To your credit, you take this issue very seriously and I am sure you continually strive to improve the contents of what is published in The Toronto Star. This kind of introspection is a necessary condition for self-improvement and I commend you for your effort. I am also convinced that you welcome your readers’ opinions and so I take the liberty to forward you my comments on the subject.
First, I would formulate the objective differently. The purpose is not to “win” the hearts and minds of everyone, or even of a majority of the public; the purpose is to be faithful to factual truths. Of course, I won’t deal with the economic considerations that surely play a role in any commercial newspaper but it seems to me that a reputable publication like The Star should focus on being respected rather than on being loved. The difficulty is to properly apprehend the facts in this “enormously complex story”, but once the facts are solidly established, nothing in your reporting or in your editorials should fly in the face of the facts for the sake of maintaining a dubious “balance.” Factual truths should be the anchor point to any valid opinion, whereas opinions which omit, distort, or disfigure them are just unfounded opinions and should not be part of any intelligent analysis. So, when you say that “bias is in the eye of the beholder”, you are right: bias is indeed a matter of opinion. But not all opinions are equally valid. The ones that rest upon factual truths are more solid (assuming the argumentation is not flawed) and should prevail, notwithstanding any desire to remain “balanced.” In fact, the pursuit of “balance” does exactly the contrary: it confers equal validity to both sides with little or no regard to the facts.
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