In a blatant violation of journalistic ethics, Time magazine assigned a homosexual reporter, John Cloud, to write the recent Time cover story on homosexual teenagers but did not disclose his conflict of interest to its readers. The story, The Battle Over Gay Teens, was the cover story in the October 10 issue.
So, Mr, Kincaid. Every time a straight report rights a story about a homosexual issue, do they have to disclose that they are heterosexual and thusly have a conflict of interest and are biased against homosexuals... because, obviously if they are straight, how on God's earth could they be objective when writing about homosexuals?
I guess every time an African-American writes a story about race or poverty affecting minorities they should disclose their obvious bias in favor of the minority perspective. Inversely, every time that a white male writes a story about minority affairs, they should disclose that they have a conflict of interest and could never write an un-biased story, because obviously they would be automatically anti-minority due to the conflict of interest.
Shouldn't a Christian disclose their religion and obvious bias every time they right a story about Islam?
Mr. Kincaid is writing a story about journalistic ethics. Shouldn't he disclose his conflicts of interst since he has none himself?
2 comments:
Actually, I agree with everyone of your hypotheticals. Disclosure is always good. The only way to be unbiased is to have no opinion or to be completely isolated from the topic. I don't think you can really write on something you're isolated from (research itself precludes this) and I don't think people tend to write about things they have no opinion on (and if they do, I suspect they don't write very well).
The problem is disclosure removes the pretense of being unbiased. But like I said, I think it's only a pretense, it's something that can't be attained so we should stop pretending.
where does it stop though. Does a woman who has had an abortion have to disclose that when right on abortion? What about a woman who has been raped reporting on a trial of a rapist?
This whould be never ending.
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