Battling Media Bias

Thanks so much for posting our launch video. We certainly appreciate the traffic and your thoughtful critique of what we are trying to do.

You raised a point we discuss often in different iterations: "one man's bailout is another man's rescue plan." Indeed it is, and, therein, our point. Both of those are slogans and, in the opinion of our community and system, neither belong in news (though you and your readers can help shape that by getting involved). The facts are what belong: it is neither a bailout nor a rescue plan---it is money the Government will borrow to, in turn, lend to businesses. It doesn't make easy copy but, the Society of Professional Journalists, on which we based our work with our Journalism Advisory Board, makes clear that over simplification is bad-practice. Our community and system thinks it can lead to sloganeering and simplistic presentation.

We ask something very clear of journalists: be transparent, share facts, be balanced, use honest source attribution. Speaking of that: you caught us---our video does not correctly site the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism and its aligned property,http://www.Stateofthenewsmedia.com for the statistics we use, we admit the error; that data is all available on our site as well.

Your magazine indeed seems focused on sharp, clear journalism, at least to me eyes. I admire you for setting forth to do that and I sincerely appreciate your analysis, criticism and time.

Todd Herman

PS: We have a new video, "Images of Spin", which features what we think is some grade-A spin ... it's less fancy but we would be very curious to see what you think of it. We also learned from our mistakes...it's source data is well attributed. ;> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5fyfqKXLr8