Impartiality

Different news agencies have reputations. Newspapers, news websites, and news TV stations are known for their liberal or conservative biases. Trying to write without a bias is one of the biggest challenges of journalism, especially when writing about a subject on which opinions are strong and polarized. Over the winter semester, one of my classes required that I write a paper on an ecological conflict in Canada. We had to write this paper from the perspective of a consultant with a completely neutral tone. While I enjoyed this assignment, I definitely found it a challenge to write neutrally when I generally agreed with the opinions of one party over the other. One thing that I found, however, was that being forced to write with a neutral tone forced me to better understand the opinion of the opposing group.

The reason I decided to write this was because of a fairly recent article in the University of Waterloo's student newspaper "Imprint" regarding the International Development program at the University of Waterloo. This article was titled "The Trials of International Development" and made an effort to highlight the benefits and challenges facing the program after the first graduating class had returned from their placements. Within a couple of days of being published, the article was read by almost all of the current International Development students in my cohort who will be leaving for our placements in September.

In my opinion, the most interesting result of this article was the variety of responses displayed by my fellow students. Some were angry that our program had be portrayed in a very negative way. They felt as though the failures of the program were overly stressed and that the article did not stress enough that this was only the first graduating class and there are challenges with any new program that must be overcome. Other students were excited about the publication of the article and felt that highlighting the problems in a public way would assist in the problems being fixed by the administration.

Personally, I found the article fairly balanced in its content. It mentioned the positive experiences had by many of the graduating students, but also highlighted the challenges faced by one of the students and lack of support that she received from the administration. My concerns with the article regarded the tone with which the author was writing. The personal opinions of the author were evident from the start of the article. Readers were informed of the facts, but this was done in a way that quickly made them critical of the International Development program.

I am perfectly willing to admit that there have been (and still are) challenges with the International Development program, but the responsibility of a newspaper article is to give an unbiased presentation of the essential facts.