I See Life From Both Sides Now…

Exampling both sides are important but you need to examine both factual sides, you need to filter out the “fake news.”

An let’s face it reporters are dumb.

When it comes to trans issues they usually don’t have a clue about the facts, I will not say they are lazy but rather they do not have the luxury to research the topic they have just been order to report on. They have a deadline and doing through research on the topic is not an option.

How ‘Both Sides’ Journalism Is Failing Transgender People
In the spirit of ‘balance,’ journalists are giving credence to the junk science and misinformation of anti-trans activists. Readers are better served with clear facts.
The Daily Beast
By Samantha Allen
May 4, 2018

Yet something similar has been happening with too much reporting about transgender people in the Trump era: Journalists omit facts in ways that make public debates over supposedly “controversial” issues—like transgender restroom use, or transgender military service, or transgender health care—seem less settled than they really are.

They present quotes from anti-transgender voices without providing the necessary information to assess the claims being made therein. They give equal weight to the opinions of anti-LGBT groups and to the positions of major medical associations, or the conclusions of independent studies.
[…]
This lazy “both sides”-style reporting is ill-fitted to the task of capturing the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to drive an already-endangered population out of public life. And it’s only becoming a more glaring problem as those attacks continue.

I wouldn’t characterize them as lazy but rather there is no incentive or time to weed out the “fake news” when they do a Google search for transgender pediatrics what pops up in the top search results? The top result is the American College of Pediatricians which is a fake doctors organization that has only a couple of hundred of doctors while American Academy of Pediatrics has tens of thousands of members.

The New York Times correctly noted in its coverage that the move would fly in the face of “many medical experts,” and reported the extremely relevant fact that the American Medical Association “opposes” altering the rule.

This is absolutely vital contextualizing information for a health care debate: The largest body of physicians in the country, with a membership of almost a quarter-million, wants the regulation left alone.

But the Associated Press story that followed eight days later made no mention of the American Medical Association’s opposition to the rewriting of the rule.

Rather, the rhythm of the AP story is like a game of ping pong, bouncing back and forth between opposing viewpoints: First a Trump official gets a quote, then a Lambda Legal lawyer, then a “religious liberty” lawyer, and then a pro-transgender Republican.
[…]
Instead of firmly situating the debate in that context, the dueling claims in the AP story seem to exist in a vacuum, where everything everyone says carries equal weight: In one section, for example, the “religious liberty” lawyer claims that the Obama-era rule “would have forced doctors to perform gender transition procedures on children.” That quote is directly followed by a paragraph contradicting that claim which begins: “The American Academy of Pediatrics says…”
[…]
The problem lies not with the AP, chosen here as a recent representative example, or with any specific story, but with the limitations of “both sides” journalism as a genre.

I remember an interview that I gave to a local television station before the interview began we were trying to direct the report to the AP and GLAAD sites on the use of pronouns and he wanted nothing to do with our suggestions… but later on the evening news he got it. He used the correct pronouns.

I remember way back in the Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and Peter Jennings era new was not a profit center to television but then the bean counters took over and the nightly news had to make a profit and the news went downhill from there.