Thanks to the anonymous poster who told me about Terri Shaivo's death, the poster, who, I assume, also sent me this information:
1) Terri signed a DNR before this whole situation developed. Meaning she did not wish to be resuscitated. This is a big reason why the Supreme Court has decided AGAIN not to hear the case.
2) her husband was offered 1M dollars to sign over her custody and refused stating he didn't want any money, only to follow the wishes of his wife
3) the last MRI taken of her brain showed no link between her brain and her spinal chord. she's in hospice for a good reason
4) her husband decided to forgo any insurance money years ago, when he first went to court
5) its been over a decade and he won't divorce his wife because then custody would go to those who wish to keep her on life support, something which she did wish to avoid and put in writing
Now, I haven't fact-checked the information, but it's probably true. Which leads me to talk about media-objectivity, or what little there actually is.
For three years, I was a freelance writer for regional and city newspapers in Oklahoma. The biggest one I worked for was the Oklahoma Gazette, a independent weekly with a circulation of half a million. The Oklahoma Gazette's features were always slanted to the liberal side of any issue. When this was brought up, fingers would inevitably point to The Oklahoman, Oklahoma's daily newspaper with a circulation of several million and a decidedly right-wing bent. So right-wing and so biased was this paper, in fact, that it was ranked the worst major daily in the nation. To achieve balance, Gazette editors said, we needed to be as liberal as they were conservative.
And it showed. I remember writing a feature on hospice care. One of the patients I interviewed was Patsy Ogle, a woman who, thanks to a rare immune deficiency syndrome, had lost most of her motor coordination and at the age of 59 sat trapped in a wheelchair. Ogle looked me in the eyes, and with tears flowing from hers, told me that she wanted to die. She wanted to die right then and no one would do it for her. Her doctors, her hospice nurse, her family, they didn't want to hear that. Her hospice nurse, when I asked her about it, said "well, maybe she has brought it up a couple times, but I try to resteer her to something more positive."
Because of that encounter, I was unwilling to stay objective on the issue, and just below the surface of that article on hospice care was an argument for the right to euthanasia. It was completely biased and I made no apologies for it.
Most journalists, myself included, would never lie. But in every quote choice, in every fact that doesn't make the cut (and in the word count-worried world of journalism, a lot gets cut), is the reporter's bias. Every article worth writing is one worth taking sides on, and behind every story is a person, not a machine, whose own opinions leak into a story—sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—and ultimately give you bias as truth.
Reporters create truth. I learned that very quickly. The event becomes the story only through the filter of the reporter. And, ultimately, what the reporter commits to print is what becomes truth to the world. On deadline, I wasn't sure all my "facts" were correct, because too often facts were coming from some people in phone interviews—who were filtering what they told me based on their own biases—and in the paper the next day would be what they told me, with, of course, hedging words like "according to" and "sources said". But I know that people read right past those words, and what is in the paper, what they read in the paper, becomes the truth. Because people trust the news.
So when I read a story about Terri Shaivo, I trust that I'm being given the whole story. Even me, who has not always included enough facts to make an issue truly balanced, assumed that people at the Associated Press were going to give it to me straight.
Apparently not.
I based my argument for Terri Shaivo's continued life on facts from AP stories. I've had discussions with friends, had my own world view shaped, by the facts in this story. If the above, additional, facts are true, then they were left out of the AP story, and what was left in were ones that helped skew my opinion: there was a million dollar settlement he stood to inherit, he had another family, he didn't bring up that she wanted to die until years later. The reporter could have chosen different facts, facts that made it seem if the parents were selfish for keeping Terri alive this long, that the husband was simply a loving crusader.
And to tell you the truth (ha ha), at times it's not even the reporter who is inserting the bias. I've had hospital PR people in on meetings with staff, telling them what they could and could not say to me. I had an editor at Loud Magazine pull all the names from an article on strip clubs because some of the clubs were advertisers for the paper. I've had editors at Nursing Times make sure that the angle on stories about this or that hospital were positive because the hospitals carried the paper, and they couldn't afford loose that point-of-pickup for such a large segment of readers.
The media is a business. Let's not forget that. When you pay $2.50 for a paper, you are paying for cost of printing and delivery. Ninety-five percent of any newspaper budget is paid for by advertisements within the paper. In fact, too often in meeting rooms I felt like the reason I was assigned a story was not because the story was important to readers, but because it was important to advertisers. Like say, a story about a new skate park opening up, ringed by advertisements for skate shops.
People sometimes wonder why so much of the news is get-too-it-first, doom-and-gloom weather, how-your-grocery-store-will-kill-your-child, bleed/lead stuff, but really it's because news programs will only stay on the air (or in print or online) if they can prove to advertisers that lots of people are watching or listening or reading. And the best way to get a lot of people to watch or read or listen is not to have objective, erudite stories, but sensationalism.
And if you've got a woman on a bed for 15 years, people are probably go to say: "just let her die." But if you twist things a little bit, make something a little sinister seem a-foot, or show images of her healthy, or a two-second clip of her responding to her mother, and play that over and over when you know she spends most of the day inert, and suddenly you have a controversial issue that people will turn on the television, tune in their radio, log onto the internet or pick up a paper every day to follow.
And that is media objectivity.