You hear that question a lot these days.  Increasing political polarization is manifesting itself in demands by those on the left and right that articles or broadcasts about touchy issues, like abortion, gun laws, voter suppression and the like, always present “both sides.” Any omission of one side’s argument is prima facie evidence of bias.

Back in the old days — the 19th Century old days — offering balanced accounts was unheard of, and for good reason.  Newspapers were seldom more than opinion broadsides, and objective reporting was nonexistent. In the aftermath of World War I, reform-minded editors adopted a standard of fairness and balance in reporting (along with accuracy, of course), and this standard held sway through most of the 2oth Century.

These days, media critics on both the left and right claim a virtual right to having their point of view receive equal treatment in any article.  The media, always sensitive to charges of bias, is responding by writing “he said, she said” narratives that increasingly obscure the news in a cascade of charges and counter-charges.  The pressure is especially acute in the newsrooms of national newspapers like the Times and the Washington Post (the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, where I once worked, has all but given up objectivity).  Any article about, say, the influence of Super PACs in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision are so blandly written, they actually distort the real news, which is, of course, how money (large quantities of money) are affecting elections.  Reporters can’t or won’t take a side in this highly controversial aspect of politics; the result is that Super PACs are often portrayed as civic-minded business benevolent assocations, no more influential than, say, your local Elks Lodge.

The sense of over-objectivity outrages many, who express their anger in blogs and posted comments.  But there doesn’t appear to be a way around the problem.  Urging supposedly unbiased newspapers to drop their objectivity would most likely exacerbate the already coarsened state of political and social discourse.  We probably don’t need, in other words, more gasoline on the flames.  But remaining safely on the altar of “balance,” poses its own risks if it drives away partisan readers (and subscribers) to bloggers and other content generators who wear their opinions on their sleeves. The advent of social media makes objectivity in reporting even more difficult; while editors struggle to fairly present both sides, consumer-generated content online has no such restriction.  In fact, a new cottage industry has sprung up, most visibly in the realm of political communications, specializing in creating canned counter-arguments intended not so much to balance the reporting, but to undermine or eviscerate the premise or the article.

By the way, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m written this blog with the sense of balance and fairness that I learned in news writing 101. I’m actually trying to present, fairly, all points of view.

Thirty years ago, the sentiments expressed here would have been welcomed by my editors and also, I suspect, most readers, for its tone of balanced objectivity.  Not anymore.  If I want to attract new readers and raise my profile, I guess I’d better start taking sides.

Polling is ubiquitous these days, especially in political campaigns. It’s hard to imagine the news media and the chatterclass functioning without polls. And they give those of us who follow politics like a spectator sport with near instantaneous information on who’s up or down, in or out, and which issues have “traction,” and which won’t last a single news cycle.

Is that a good thing?

Well-designed polls from reliable organizations can present a reasonable snapshot of public opinion towards candidates and issues. Polls conducted by or for news media organizations also provide additional content for each day’s news cycle, as this example shows.  The New York Times’ political coverage is supplemented virtually every day with polling data from researcher Nate Silver.  His reports serve as a kind of daily racing form enabling political junkies to handicap election contests. Polls also clearly the power of immediacy. They can, for example, provide virtually feedback on a candidate’s debate performance; Gerald Ford’s startling assertion in 1976 that Poland was not under the thumb of the Soviet Union generated an immediate negative reaction in polling, and helped sink his candidacy. Newt Gingrich apparently won this year’s South Carolina GOP primary for challenging a CNN moderator about charges of marital strife, polls immediately showed. On the other hand, polls can be wrong, or misleading or — worse — manipulative. Much depends on the size of the polling sample as well as its demographic variety. This presents challenges to pollsters, especially those who rely on telephone sampling. Lots of people these days no longer have landline phone service, and mobile phone numbers are difficult to obtain. Ethnic and racial diverse audiences are typically under-represented, while seniors are over-represented. Independent research also has demonstrated that poll respondents often repeat inaccurate information they’ve read or heard and then cling to their misconceptions even when the correct information becomes available. ”People recall facts that support their beliefs, and don’t recall facts that contradict beliefs,” says Leo Simonetta, a social psychologist and director of analytics for the Art & Science Group, a Baltimore-based education consultancy.

Polling, no matter how well it’s done, replaces the visceral nature of campaigns with detached “ojectivity.” It gathers and collates the opinions of people — thousands of them — and yet most polls seem strangely impersonal, with thoughtfulness, emotion, hesitation and insight scrubbed out of the data. It’s much harder as a result to find detailed candidate profiles, of the kind that Joe McGinniss or Tom Wicker used to write “from the back of the (campaign) bus.” When I covered politics many years ago, my editors insisted that I spend time driving and flying around with the candidates, and write about what I saw, heard and felt. It wasn’t important to predict who would win.  Rather, my job was to give readers an insight into the candidates, and help them answer the question: would you have this guy over for dinner?

In any event, public opinion polling here to stay. It does makes you wonder, though, what it must have been like back in the days when, without polling to foreshadow the outcome, people didn’t have a clue who was going to win on election day. Not knowing was a lot more fun.  Which is not a bad thing at all.

I’m one of those who believes that there always will be a strong demand for high quality content produced by skilled, professional journalists and writers. People will pay to read articles that are rich in facts, interpretation and perspective that people, not just through traditional subscriptions for print versions, but also online. This is the premise of the grand experiment by the New York Times to now require folks to pay for the electronic versions of the paper, after years of making it available free. It’s the latest stab at generating a revenue stream from online content; so far, most such efforts have failed or produced, at best, anemic results. For media companies, especially old-line publishers, making online content profitable is the business challenge today.

But what kind of content? Rosenstiel offers a sobering, unsettling answer. Under the sub-heading “Content will always be king,” Rosenstiel writes the following:

“The syllogism that helped journalism prosper in the 20th Century was simple: Produce the journalism (or “content”) that people want, and you will succeed. But that may no longer be enough. (italics added). The key to media in the 21st Century may be who has the best knowledge of audience behavior, not who produces the most popular content. Understanding what sites people visit, what content they view, what products they buy and even their geographic coordinates will allow advertisers to better target individual consumers. And more of that knowledge will reside with technology companies than with content producers.”

Wow! Rosenstiel is a veteran journalist and respected media analyst, and when he writes that the ground has shifted from producer to audience, alarm bells ought to be going off in newsrooms and editorial offices everywhere.

Those bells are already ringing loudly. In today’s information environment, households and neighborhoods are niche markets that content providers — newspapers, advertisers, marketers, et al — must penetrate with relevant, narrowly targeted (zipcode by zipcode) information. Content is generated not just by professional reporters, but increasingly by neighborhood “correspondents,” self-styled “citizen journalists or, perhaps most ominously from the standpoint of transparency of sources, by ad and marketing firms that are very happy to provide information on behalf of their paying clients.  Social media tweeting is all the rage because it gives a communications conduit to virtually anyone with a cellphone and internet connection, all of which was dramatically on display in Egypt earlier this year.  But who are these sources, and are they trustworthy?

In fact, the gatekeeping editorial function, which for generations acted as a screen to insure that “news” was at least based on fact and detail, is under heavy assault everywhere.  If everyone is equally credible, and there’s no way to assess the legitimacy of content providers, who’s to say whether the news we are seeing is reliable.  Meanwhile, those reporters who are still plugging away — except at the very best media companes — are less and less assigned to report and longish, explanatory articles that were the staple of newspapers for generations.  For one thing, no one can afford the time.  For another, it isn’t the content today’s market wants.

For journalism all this represents a huge milestone. The transition away from hard news to marketing-driven content is enormously consequential. As Rosenstiel suggests, it’s more important today (and more lucrative) for media companies to offer content that is discrete and personal rather than general and societal.  No one seriously wants to return to the days when news was whatever crusty, cigar-chomping editors said it was.  But are we as a society okay with turning this vital editorial function over to marketing and advertising strategists savvy about what sells?  Or, more precisely, are we prepared to embrace a society in which search algorithms increasingly determine what information is best for us?

Apparently so.  Web advertising in 2010 reached $26 billion, surpassing print advertising for the first time. Yet as Rosenstiel points out, only about a fifth of that total went to news organizations. The largest share, by far, went to search engine sites, especially Google.  What that tells us is that if the news media used to be the primary conduit to reach consumers, that day is long gone.

Where does this take us? If present trends continue, profits and influence will continue to flow in every increasing tides to those companies best able to translate demographic and consumer purchase data into content-specific “news.”  Right now, Facebook and Google are leading this growing wave of audience-related content, and the two of them are battling it out full time to know more about each of us than we do on our own. Not a comforting thought.

The Times’ announcement is fraught with uncertainties about whether readers accustomed to free online content will pay for it. But the Times, as it was at great pains to explain, has little other choice — free content, the giant publisher concedes —doesn’t pay.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that in 2010, online advertising and readership surpassed newspapers for the first time ever.

That’s hardly news, since we’ve seen this coming for several years.  Still, the report presents sobering data for publishers and consumers alike:

• Newspaper ad revenue in 2010 fell 46 percent in four years to an estimated $22.8 billion, with an additional $3 billion more for online advertising according to the report.
• Meanwhile online advertising is at $25.8 billion in 2010, the study said, citing data from researcher eMarketer.

These kinds of numbers directly impact the newspapers’ fundamental purpose: the gathering and writing of news.  Says the study: “a challenge for news organizations is that much of this online ad spending, 48 percent, is in search advertising, little of which finances news.” Newsrooms are currently 30 percent smaller than they were in 2000, the study added.

And there you have it.  Online news and advertising trends, although going up, may not be sufficient to sustain extensive news gathering operations, which is in part why the Journal charges online readers for its premium content, and why the New York Times is soon to follow suit.  Free content, in fact, could be an endangered feature of the Internet.

Well, so what? After all, the “news” and a whole lot else is readily available, 24/7, not just online, but on phones, personal computers and via social media. There are in fact more media platforms available than at any time in history.  And all of it, or at least, most of it, is free.

We ought to care about what these numbers are telling us, because they underscore an emerging reality.  Free content — or more precisely, free high quality content — is, like the print version of your daily paper, also going away.

The Times, along with a handful of other esteemed print publications, is in the vanguard to creating content delivery platforms to reach the broadest possible audiences. Its e-version is in many ways superior to the Times’ print edition because of its successful marriage of content with graphics and technology.  The before-and-after images of the impact of the tsunami on Japanese cities are proof of that. But huge investments are required to produce those images, and as the Pew report emphasizes, online ad revenue isn’t sufficient to sustain newsgathering operations.

Which raises a fundamental, societal, issue.  What value do we place on professionally reported and edited content?  Think about all the amateur video we’ve seen in the aftermath of recent disasters like 9-11, Katrina, Haiti and Japan.  It’s available to us to watch and marvel, totally without charge.  It’s also the quintessential WYSISWHYG version of news. What’s not available, unless you go to the Times’ website (or CNN or the Journal, or even Fox News) is the context — is the explanation, the background, the significance and meaning of what you are seeing with your own eyes.  That content can only come from trained, experienced reporters on the scene, backed by knowledgeable editors who supply the big picture perspective.

Are these elements important enough that the public will pay for them?

In the years immediately ahead, how we answer that question will determine whether newspapers — indeed all professional newsgathering services — survive at all.