About Oct. 20, 2005, U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations broadcast a documentary entitled Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories. Reviewing the documentary, the ombudsman for PBS and the ombudsman for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) both expressed concern that the documentary did not fairly document the problem it addressed.
In response to numerous complaints of bias, on Dec. 21 PBS issued a statement that declared, “The producers approached the topic with the open mindedness and commitment to fairness that we require of our journalists.” Enjoy your holiday! No problem here. We hope that you’ll forget about this little documentary and troublemakers like these before the time comes to celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday.
A subsequent letter (pdf) from a media watchdog group to the Inspector General of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting suggests that at least some observers consider the PBS review for bias to have been highly biased. The PBS institutional review also seemed to fail to impress the CPB ombudsman. He subsequently declared, “I found the program to be so totally unbalanced as to fall outside the boundaries of PBS editorial standards on fairness and balance.”
Bias has been a perennial concern with respect to traditional media. Recently, a study of media bias (pdf draft) , forthcoming in a leading economics journal, found empirical evidence of media bias. Some blogs, which make no claim to be unbiased, have sharply criticized the study.
Evaluating media bias is difficult discursively and institutionally. New video distribution networks, along with cheap, powerful, video cameras and desktop video editing software, give everyone a chance to be a video producer. That might help educate persons to evaluate bias more reasonably. I encourage you to consider this unbiased news video reporting on the Galbi brothers’ 800 meter challenge!