[AE.Opinion] Of Fair (And Balanced) Reporting
Author's Note: This is an essay adapted from some old tweets of mine as an exercise in creative non-fiction writing to hone my rusty skills after a long period of burnout.
Imagine a city.
It can be a real city you know, or one you know of, or one that doesn't exist anywhere but your own mind. The only thing that is necessary for the purpose of this exercise is that this city contains within it a major metropolitan newspaper that enjoys national circulation and web traffic, and a multiday street fair.
Imagine that after the first day of the fair, this news outlet receives two pitches from freelance reporters who want to sell it a story about the street fair, chronicling the sights and sounds and sensations on offer within it.
The first reporter spent a whole day at the fair, sampling the offerings of the vendors, taking in the entertainment, and collecting statements from performers, officials, and other attendees. This reporter has a lot of information about the fair, good and bad, including advice for attendees and issues that the fair should address in the following days.
The other reporter stayed far away from the fair, while letting their imagination run wild with all the things that might be wrong with it: greasy food from unhygienic stalls, rude behavior by drunken guests, obnoxiously bad live music, and so on. While this second reporter has no end of imaginary complaints about the street fair to the point that it seems like they must hate the very idea of the thing, they paradoxically know nothing about the real, concrete, non-hypothetical issues the first reporter noted from their view on the ground.
If I were to ask you which reporter had the better perspective for the paper to buy and then re-sell to their readership, you might very well wonder why I bothered asking. You certainly should wonder why the second reporter even pitched the story.
But ridiculous as this scenario is, the reality is that in newsrooms across the country, editors are making a point to listen to the equivalent of the second reporter when it comes to anything the right-wing cultural warriors might derisively dismiss as "identity politics".
There's a school of thought... not a particularly good school and not at all a good thought... that says that the people who are closest to an issue, the people who are affected by and experience an issue, cannot be trusted to judge it or report on it.
Black reporters are so often discouraged from reporting on racism on the grounds that they will be biased. Trans people never seem to be the go-to for reporting or opining on trans issues. The perspectives of disabled people barely feature in articles that are ostensibly about us but are certainly not written by us.
On the other hand, to suggest that someone else writing about these issues is biased in the opposite direction is viewed as an unsupported accusation, and a far worse one than the initial assumption of bias... it's held to be a neutral and objective observation to suggest that trans people must necessarily be biased in favor of trans people, but to suggest that someone like, say, Jesse Singal is biased against us is to accuse him of transphobia.
And because his writings on trans issues are held to be objective, he is hired to write on this topic again and again. And because he writes on this topic repeatedly, he is regarded as an expert. And because he is regarded as an expert, his expertise is sought out... which, of course, leads to more writing.
And every time a trans person objects to this most vicious of cycles, it's taken as proof that we are too biased to be trusted when it comes to reporting on the subject of our own lives: too emotional, too involved, too close to the subject.
When it comes to reporting on the needs of anyone whose life and lived experiences don't match up to those of the people who call the shots at the editorial and corporate levels, the entire media-engagement complex has adopted practices that amount to the equivalent of only allowing movie reviews from critics who have pointedly avoided seeing the film for fear of thereby influencing their opinion.
It's a ridiculous state of affairs, and one whose flaws are all too apparent as soon as we imagine the principle at work in any area that isn't the lives of the marginalized.
And that would be the point. While it's possible that some of the guardians of objectivity and neutrality in reporting are honestly swallowing the line that's dangled in front of them, the maxim that the purpose of a system is whatever it does applies here; what this approach to editorial decision-making does is keep marginalized voices trapped in the margins while centering the voices of those who would silence us, and that, we can conclude, is its purpose.