Unbiased?

By: Sarah Harl

Kelly McBride, columnist for Poynter Online, a source for "everything ethics," speaks her mind on "gotcha" interviewing in a recent column.

McBride is referring to recent interviews conducted with John McCain and Sarah Palin by Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. It was argued by some that these were more interrogations than interviews designed to embarrass the duo, specifically Palin.

McCain described his displeasure with the reporting, saying he felt the journalists were not providing all of the necessary information to make the questions clear and straightforward.

McBride proceeded to give the readers a textbook explanation of deceptive journalism, and how what Couric and Gibson did was not considered deceiving journalism, and was therefore not biased.

Now, it is true that none of these questions were out of order: McBride is correct about that. What she fails to understand is that people find it biased when you drill Senator McCain and Governor Palin about hypothetical situations of country A invading country B, and then you ask Senator Obama what he likes to do with his family.

If Obama had been as aggressively interviewed as the Republican ticket, there probably would have been inconsistencies in his story too. And that is what is unfair about this situation: not that Palin and McCain were asked tough questions, but that Obama has consistently not been asked the same questions.

So McBride could have saved the lecture in fair journalism, because it can simply be achieved by asking both candidates the same questions in the same way.

Unbiased.