Perspective

   News reporting is easy.
   You just go to where the action is, take notes on what happened, along with who said what, where it happened, when and why. Plus how it happened.
   Then you select the most important parts of each of the Five Ws and tell the story.
   Keep it to six paragraphs, says your editor, because that's all the space available for that particular story.
   Easy, right?
   Sure.

   When a major political candidate visits your home town and speaks for an hour, the reporter assigned to the event has to condense the speech into perhaps 500 words -- about 12 column inches of text in a newspaper.
   That's easy too, right?
   Sure.

   Except that supporters of the candidate want a full verbatim transcript of every hallowed word. Not going to happen. Why? No space.
   Besides, the opposing candidate will want equal space. Meanwhile, the featured speaker will accuse the reporter and editor of bias, prejudice, incompetence and a few other choice words not used in polite company if the story is the least bit negative in any way. To politicians, neutrality is negative.
   That's not news, it's propaganda.
   Similar principles apply to television. Candidates may want every station and network to carry every moment of every appearance everywhere, without commentary or analysis.
   Reporters and editors have the duty, responsibility and obligation to present the news impartially. A major part of that is deciding what is newsworthy and what is prattle, and these decisions are by nature selective.
   Judgmental? Yes. The issue, then, is one of perception: Selective to one side is biased to the other. Reporters and editors are indeed selective. Biased? Not necessarily, although that is one of the risks of having a free press and the guarantee of free speech. Reporters care most about writing a good story. And yes, that's judgmental.