Article October 7, 2019 Issue

Integrity: The path out of political bias

Jenny Sawyer with David Clark Scott

A version of this article was published on sentinel.christianscience.com, July 8, 2019.

Biases. We all have them. The question, says David Clark Scott, Audience Engagement Editor at The Christian Science Monitor, is: What do we do about them? At a time when readers seem more and more politically polarized, Mr. Scott talked to the Christian Science Sentinel’s Jenny Sawyer about how we can all learn to read—and think—with more integrity, and the payoffs of doing so.

Let’s start by looking at the news from your vantage point as an editor. To tell a story, you have to have an angle—a particular way of framing the story—and finding that angle can be a place where writers may fall prey to bias. How do you deal with that?

For me it’s about challenging bias. As you said, bias is kind of inevitable. So telling or editing a story with integrity means making a commitment to pursue the truth—wherever it lies. I don’t want my own political bias to interfere with my pursuit of the truth. And so part of the goal of going after the truth is having the integrity to challenge your assumptions.

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