The current issue of the American Journalism Review has an excellent article by Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi analyzing the charges of media bias in our current political campaign and in general. I urge you to read the full article, but one portion stood out to me:

The public doesn’t really understand how the news is made.

That might sound elitist, except that much of the daily suspicion cast on reporters’ work seems to stem from naïveté and reflexive public cynicism. Ask journalists about a recent accusation of bias and watch their eyes begin to roll. Julie Mason, the Houston Chronicle’s White House reporter, remembers one reader who took her to task for being “obsessed” with John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. Obsessed? She was covering his campaign. “It was my job to be with him every day,” she laughs.

Another reader spotted bias in the placement of quotes in one of Mason’s stories. “I’m biased,” she says, “because I put the quote in after the jump, which to them means I’m trying to bury it. They don’t believe you when you say you don’t control where a story jumped.”

| FULL ARTICLE |

I think that this notion is an essential truth right now and a reason why so many people feel that media is biased. The public seem to have this grim notion that all of the reporters, editors and the rest of the people that make the news sit around and conjure up evil machinations on how they can destroy, exploit and make money.

One of the more interesting charges comes when people accuse the media of using a particular, sensationalist article to increase circulation and readership, and thus, increasing salaries. As if there is a direct correlation between a reporter’s pay and how much attention one article receives. It’s not the stock market, it’s a newsroom.

These charges and the current misunderstanding of how the news is made reinforces the need to create a more transparent newsroom, something the Internet can handle far better than ‘Letters to the Editor’ or an ombudsman.

Increasingly newsrooms are doing Q & A sessions online with newsroom staff (i.e. NY Times, Dallas Morning News) and projects like the above-mentioned newsroom.

There’s that tired adage about not wanting to know how the sausage is made, but in our industry, I think it’s high time we started letting people check out the ingredients. If not just for them, but also for us.