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  • Good evening.

  • I'm Anthony Mason.

  • Hello.

  • I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington.

  • Spending just deport.

  • Welcome to the World News from Al Jazeera News.

  • You are fake news, sir.

  • Media organizations often use words like balance and fairness.

  • They want to say that they're reporting without showing favoritism or making judgments.

  • Balance simply means giving equal time to both sides of an issue or not, giving one side more importance.

  • For example, let's consider a report about abortion bills winding their way through US legislatures.

  • A balanced report will give equal time to both supporters of abortion and those opposed to the procedure.

  • However, journalists must verify the facts put forth by each side.

  • It is not balanced to allow both sides to make any statement supporting their case.

  • This can perpetuate fake news and leaves the reader or viewer without solid information.

  • Will you just shut up for a minute and let me Teoh?

  • Shouting and arguing does not bring balance to an issue, and it certainly isn't journalism.

  • But journalists must be careful that seeking balance doesn't lead to unfair reporting or setting up an unfair moral equivalency or balance between unequal sides in an argument.

  • Actually, objectivity means reporting the truth.

  • It means getting everybody's truth and reporting it, but never creating a false moral equivalence.

  • Never saying all sides of equal because that's not the truth.

  • That's false.

  • That's a cop out.

  • Its ally, journalist Christiane Amanpour, is talking about the Bosnian war, where she reported on attacks against Bosnian Muslims.

  • Experts called it a kind of ethnic cleansing to give equal weight to official denials of the violence she saw would have been wrong.

  • Fair reporting represents reality, not a simple, he said.

  • She said false moral equivalency is a failure of journalists to carry out their duties.

  • A smartnews consumer must ask, Is this coverage fair to the evidence?

  • And what exactly is evidence?

  • In less than five, we will explain how to evaluate news coverage in order to answer these questions.

Good evening.

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