Fair and Biased

By Art Gallagher

The tag line for this blog, Fair and Biased News and Commentary, often gets one of two reactions. The most frequent is laughter followed by the exclamation, “I love that!” The next most frequent reaction is, “You can’t be both!”

I say, you’re not being fair if you are not upfront about your bias.

A few weeks back the Asbury Park Press had an editorial chastising FoxNews because its owners had made significant financial contributions to Republican causes. The jist of the editorial was that the contributions proved that FoxNews was biased, not “Fair and Balanced.” The APP editorial board wrote of how hard legitimate journalists work to present to the news objectively. If that is true, it isn’t working.

Earlier this week Governor Christie held a town hall in Raritan where he got into it with a school teacher. I’ve found two videos of the event, one published by RealClearPolitics the other by NJ.com under the tag Star Ledger videos.

One of the video presentations is fair and biased. The other is just biased.

After viewing those two videos I’m left with the question, “is that teacher more concerned about paying her bills or is she more concerned about her students getting enough to eat.