Thursday 13 November 2008

Impartiality, Balance and Fairness

We as Journalist believe that information gathering requires Fairness, Balance and Impartiality primarily for ethical reasons in modern day journalism. It is important to be objective in one's judgments rather than objective in order to give a fair and balanced report on a story. If there is act of bias and impartiality it leads to stories which are biased and unreliable and the implication of this could be costly sometimes involving prison or even death. An example is, A news report may not examine in their news coverage other recognisable political parties apart from the Labour Party, Conservative Party or Liberal Democrats, this compromises other political parties and by doing this it becomes unfair and and a biased report going away from the Journalistic code of conduct. For their part, journalists may be unaware of how their own biases can distort their coverage however this is unacceptable for it could prove costly to those being underrepresented.
Balance concerns how equally sides to a conflict are treated relative to one another. It is important that a Journalist remains impartial throughout despite their political, social or moral background through this the audience receives an undistorted report and are therefore allowed to make their own judgements.
It is sometimes considered almost impossible to remain neutral however it is very essential to the successful delivery of a good story.
In my study of Journalism I have found that Impartiality, Balance and Fairness is rarely practised in many newspapers, one example is The Sun newspaper which often promotes xenophobia and nationalism because of its reading demographic, much of its stories a
lack accuracy and truthfulness and has led to lot of libel cases brought against a newspaper which is meant to be a composition of Impartiality,Balance and Fairness.

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