The Trouble with Being Fair

By Thomas Griffith

Accuse to journalist of being biased, and he will bridle. He will admit to having how of his own but argue that as a professional, he knows how to put and aside when he covers the news. Nine out of ten reporters and editors will say that they are willing to be judged by how fair their stories to all sides. The tenth is named John L. Perry, and he is the editor of the Rome, Ga., News-Tribune.

In a speech to his fellow Georgian journalists (later reprinted in Editor & Publisher), Perry advised them, "Forget fair." He thinks that accenting fairness is a sure way to make newspapers "a gray morass of innocuous inanity." Not long ago, his paper, which is home owned in a city of 30,000, reported a crime in a convenience store. Two men forced the night clerk to open the till and then raped her. The paper reported the store's name and its location but not the victim's name.

A representative of the convenience-store chain complained that it was unfair to identify the store because that would tend also to identify the victim ("There is an element of validity to that," Perry concedes), but was more upset that the story had mentioned the chain's name. The only way the story could have been written to satisfy this complainant, Perry says, was "A woman was raped late last night someplace here." People involved in the news do not really want fairness, he insists, they want "favor, exemption, protection from public notice...They want only the 'good' news published--that their daughter won the scholarship, that their office exceeded its United Way goal."

Perry believed that a newspaper's duty is to be "accurate, timely, incisive and pertinent. Forget fair." Journalists working under the stresses of life in big cities may think of smaller communities like Rome as tranquil. The fact is that Editor Perry may be closer to the kitchen, and to the heat, than they are.

Newspapers, concerned about their credibility, are increasingly bent on parading as well as practicing their dedication to fairness. Let so-and-so be accused of defrauding a widow, and the New York Times will meticulously note that he "did not return telephone calls." A guilty person can no longer just hide out waiting for a story to blow over; he also stands convicted of not answering his phone. The late Edward R. Murrow used to complain against the kind of mentality that would give Judas equal space for his side of the story.

Today's newspaper is an odd mix of "fair" news, bland editorials and strong views of licensed polemicists. Fairness is not required of the polemicists; it would dull their act. These merchants of anger and scorn range from Mary McGrory's liberalism to the caustic contentiousness of William Buckley, George Will, James Kilpatrick and William Safire (those on the right now have the momentum, the self-assurance and the numbers).

When it televised to fairness, what of the press conference and the televised interview? Too often, particularly when one of television's designated news personalities is doing the asking, the questioner seems bent on drawing attention across bad or hoping to provoke a quotable row. It comes across as badgering. But press conferences and interviews emerged historically as a means to check the unchallenged "Now hear this" of authority. The questioner exists to make that respond to aspects of the story, uncomfortable to them, that otherwise might not get heard. A one-sided presentation thus becomes more of a fair exchange. Editor Perry may want to forget fair, but in this business there seems to be no escaping it.