Transparency

Madeline Butina

By Joe Heller for the Green Bay Press-Gazette

How transparent is transparent enough to satisfy journalists' ethics codes guidelines? There has been a lot of emphasis in recent political atmosphere placed on the media's responsibility to find truth and report it honestly and sincerely — clarity about what information came from whom, why the journalist chose to include the facts they did and admitting a lack of knowledge if necessary are all tips that the New Ethics of Journalism textbook lists as ways to ensure transparency.

However, you could argue that by being transparent, journalists have an obligation to disclose their opinions as well. In order to promote fairness, wouldn't it make sense for the author of an article to disclose any innate biases or opinions influencing the way he or she writes?

Though we may strive to be meticulous, journalists are not robots. At the end of the day (or the end of the page), journalists are humans with feelings and opinions. Objectivity has been a sought-after ideal of the media: we need to report the best without letting the audience know how we truly feel.

While objectivity is just in that it allows all (or many) sides of a story to be told, it takes away from the author's humanity. After all, that's what we're being taught in journalism school: humanize the news. How can we do this if our own opinions have no place in our work?

I'm not saying that we need only report one side to controversial topics. This would create a wretched media world where each publication could be horrifically one-sided and extremist. Ideally, journalists would have enough tact to know which topics they can fairly report and which host too many conflicts of interest. Where that line is drawn, though, I do not know.

However, there should be less importance placed on keeping things *fair* to all parties involved and more substance on the truth. If the truth is that the mayor of a city drunkenly crashed a pool party and there is evidence that she did, in fact, do that, then journalists should pay less mind to interviewing those that try to put out the mayor's fires and claim she did otherwise.

Disclosing that a journalist did not vote for the mayor in a previous election may cause the reader to look at the article differently: did the mayor really behave in as eclectic a manner the journalist described, or is their bias showing? Maybe asking that question knowing the journalist is not a fan of the mayor is better than the audience assuming the journalist feels a certain way based on the article alone. Assumption is not transparent.

If a reader has to assume anything after reading an article, the author has not answered all questions. After all, isn't that transparency? Letting the audience in on the entire process? Why did the journalist choose to report what he or she did, and in what particular fashion?  Perhaps answering the question about their own bias should be part of the process.

mb978716@ohio.edu