Honestly Biased

If you’ve stopped laughing now, I will explain. No journalist is objective. He is not an ideological eunuch. If he were, he would be an extremely boring journalist. The independent journalist is a myth sedulously fostered by those who pretend that somehow journalists are "different". I have voted this weekend and you can be sure that my biases played a major part in my decision. Journalists the world over behave similarly. If they claimed that their individual biases had been set aside in their choice, they would be lying.

My personal preferences, on the other hand, do not restrict the range of my editorial agenda. A free and open journal which invites debate and dissent should be fair, even though it may have (like Outlook!) a broad political positioning. What do I mean by fair? Two examples should suffice. The Gandhi family’s assertion that it does not believe in dynastic politics, indeed that it is out to demolish the dynastic principle, is bogus. If you are a Congress supporter, you have to live with dynastic politics.

Second, Narendra Modi. For all his sins, Mr Modi runs an efficient, relatively honest administration which has performed remarkably well on developmental parameters. There are two sides to the Modi coin. The Muslim massacres do not cancel out his achievements as chief minister. And vice-versa.

I maintain I am an unbiased journalist, although there may have been occasional lapses since I became editor of Debonair. Even when I was editing the aforementioned girlie magazine, I was accused of bias: the centrespread ladies, it was alleged, were shown left-inclined!