Journalism can never be unbiased because human beings can never be unbiased. The best we can expect from journalists, as is the best we can expect from human beings, is that they give a reasonable account in defense for their more controversial stories. So what constitutes a reasonable account? Well first of all a firm grounding in the facts. The problem is that the more controversial the issue, the more difficult to establish and prioritize the relevant facts.
Have you ever had an argument with a 9/11 Truther? If they lean Left, they believe it was a Bush administration inside job, and if they lean Right, they'll argue that it was coordinated by the Israelis or some other conspiracy. When you ask them what are the sources for their facts, they direct you to websites or podcasts where experts in engineering, explosives, etc., make a factual case for why the official explanations cannot be possibly correct, and so then select and present the facts and quasi-facts that support alternative narratives that they argue connect the dots in ways that make much more sense.
They do not make irrational arguments, but they do make arguments that reek of confirmation bias in matters where the facts are hard to pin down. Am I guilty of confirmation bias in rejecting their conspiracy narratives? Maybe. But the official Osama bin Laden story makes enough sense for me that I choose to believe that it, or something like it, is the most likely explanation, even if the real truth is much more complex and thorny.
But the bottom line comes down to this, I don't want to spend my time and energy going down these rabbit holes. I've got better things to do. But this gets to the nub of the issue when it comes to trusting journalistic narratives. Most people when it comes to the reporting of the everyday news don't have the time and energy to chase down the truthfulness of what they hear and read. They trust their sources, and they trust them to a large extent because of their own confirmation biases, i.e., because these sources tell them what they already believe and want to hear.
Nevertheless, despite the unavoidable bias, an essential criteria for trusting a news source is the quality of their fact checking. And so when I read the NY Times or The Atlantic or the New Yorker, I know that they take fact checking very seriously. Certainly in a way that FOX or any of the MAGA supporting media do not. Will the Liberal interpretation of the facts render their stories as unbiased? Of course not. Might the facts they choose to foreground as more salient and which to background be biased? For sure. But I trust that these media make a good-faith effort to write stories that are rigorously fact checked and reasonable. And I try to be aware and critical as I can be of their biases--and my own--in evaluating the truth value of the story.
And this is really the difference between the cultural Left and cultural Right at this moment. They both read or listen to media that confirms their biases, but the Liberal media have far higher journalistic standards for basing their stories in facts. The MAGA Right doesn't believe that. They believe that the stories reported in the MSM are just as factually baseless as the stories the Right media put out. But it's just not true. There's a huge difference between stories that have no factual or evidentiary basis and biased stories that do have a factual and evidentiary basis. You can have a reasonable argument with the latter; you can't with the former.
Both Left and Right media focus on stories that support their biases because they both foreground facts that are shaped by those biases, but one is far more trustworthy than the other. One provides stories or makes arguments that are reasonable because they make a good faith effort to be grounded in actual facts, and they are far more open to engage with alternative arguments that interpret the facts differently or emphasize facts that were backgrounded or de-emphasized. You can argue with people with whom you disagree but who are committed to factuality; you can't with people for whom facts don't matter.
This is why Chris Licht was doomed from the start at CNN and why his previous bosses Joe Scarborough and Stephen Colbert told him not to take the job. The picture of him that emerges from the Tim Alberta story that apparently did him in was that he was well-intentioned, but astonishingly naive in his belief that he could make CNN a place that was factually rigorous and still be a place where Republicans could feel comfortable. Why was this so naive? Because the only Republicans and conservatives who respect the facts are Never-Trumpers.
Liberal media is saturated with Conservatives who are never Trumpers. But none of them are in office because any elected Republican politician cannot remain an elected Republican politician unless he or she endorse Trump's egregious, over-the-top lies. To be a Republican who is not a Never-Trumper means that you cannot tell the truth when you appear on any media--whether Liberal or Conservative. Some will tell reporters off the record that they think Trump is a sociopathic liar, but they won't do it on the record. To be a Republican with a future in politics requires that you either lie or refuse to refute the lie. You can rationalize it as the price of remaining in business, but it makes no sense to appear on any media where the fundamental lying will be challenged. Why expose yourself to that?
That's why no elected Republicans (hardly ever) appear on CNN or MSNBC. It's not because of Liberal bias; it's because they don't want to be confronted with the facts because to acknowledge them is political suicide. The best they can do if they choose to appear on Liberal MSM is refuse to answer questions and filibuster talking points that they've prepared in advance. There is no possibility of a good-faith argument or debate. Chris Christie when he was a Trump surrogate was an outlier in willing to debate on Liberal media platforms, but now even he's a Never-Trumper.
And so in the end, whatever might have been good faith in Chris Licht's attempt to make CNN more MAGA-friendly was always impossible if CNN was to retain any journalistic integrity. The absurdity of the CNN platforming the New Hampshire town hall proves it. Trump gets everything he wanted if he is to condescend to appear on CNN, and this means giving him an open platform to promote his lies. Sure, there would be a pretense of fact-checking, but in front of a live MAGA audience that has no interest in the facts. It only cares about retaining its delusional narrative of election fraud and Liberal moral turpitude.
And so Kaitlan Collins, the CNN host, tried her best to challenge the lies, but they came so fast and furious that she couldn't keep up. And so the whole thing blows up in CNN's face: Rather than presenting itself as media where MAGA can feel comfortable, MAGA folks walk away thinking that CNN is just what they always thought it was--hostile to Trump. Was any other outcome possible? The goal of having a fact-based forum with Trump in which MAGA world would feel comfortable was from the beginning an impossibility. To care about the facts and expect MAGA to thank CNN for insisting on them are two mutually exclusive goals. In the end CNN does not get its win. It just gives Trump another opportunity to excrete his lies and to give MAGA good reason to continue to hate CNN.