Just the Facts — No ‘False Balance’ Wanted Here

Who would have thought that “false equivalency” could turn out to be fighting words?

Hardly anything sends Times readers for their boxing gloves as quickly as does the practice of “he said/she said” reporting. (Here’s an extreme and made-up example just for the sake of illustration: “Some sources believe that the earth is flat; others insist that it is round.”)

When I wrote about this last fall, I got a lot of agreement from readers; they made it clear that news organizations ought to go out of their way to state established truths when they can and not give equal weight to both sides, if one side clearly represents what is true. (Not everyone, of course, can agree on what the facts are.)

Since then, the resistance to this longtime news-media practice â€" often done in the name of fairness â€" has only grown stronger, as it’s become part of a broader discussion about journalistic principles and practices.

In general, The Times tries to avoid letting two sides of a debate get equal time when one of them represents an established truth, or equating two things that aren’t equal. (This comes up, particularly, in Science section articles and even more particularly, in discussions about climate change.)

But those efforts aren’t universally successful. In the service of keeping the pressure on, here are three examples to ponder. (And, please bear in mind, there’s no equivalency here, either; they are all quite different from one another.)

On Jenny McCarthy. As Brendan Nyhan wrote in Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday, the naming of the actress Jenny McCarthy as co-host of “The View” has reignited the protests over her debunked insistence that some vaccines contribute to autism. Mr. Nyhan’s piece took to task the false balance among media organizations in reporting this aspect of her ascension. He wrote that “the early coverage has generally failed to follow best practices for covering false or unsupported claims, giving greater reach to discredited claims that have potentially dangerous consequences for public health.”

He writes that one of the few organizations which got it right was The Times. Mr. Nyhan wrote that two writers “stood out for providing fact-based coverage”:

The New York Times television writer Bill Carter stated directly that McCarthy’s claims are based on a “widely disproved theory [that] has led to unnecessary illnesses in children, according to child health experts,” while the Los Angeles Times entertainment reporter Meredith Blake immediately described McCarthy’s views as “discredited” in an initial blog post yesterday.

It can be important to state both sides of an argument â€" but only when both sides are legitimate.

On Congressional Gridlock. James Fallows, a writer at The Atlantic, criticized for false equivalency a “Congressional Memo,” from The Times. In its online version, the piece contained this passage: “In both the Senate, controlled by Democrats, and the House, under the rule of Republicans, the minority is largely powerless to do anything but protest.”

By the time the article made it into print, it had been changed, but the earlier version set off some reader protests, including one from Jason T. Wright, a professor at Penn State University.

“In addition to being both a false equivalence and just false, this sentence contradicts the thesis of the article, which is that Congress cannot function because of partisanship.” He noted that “the minority in the Senate is very powerful indeed.”

I asked the reporter Jennifer Steinhauer to respond.

“When I wrote the piece, I was thinking specifically of the proposed Senate rules change, which in this case was something Republicans were unable to impact, as was on display on the Senate floor,” she said.

An editor pointed out around the time that it was published online that the sentence could be interpreted more broadly, and Ms. Steinhauer agreed to the change. But a series of miscommunications and process-related problems resulted in its not being changed until the print edition, she said. As the piece appeared in print (and as it would have appeared almost immediately if not for the mix-up), it read:

“In the House, under the rule of Republicans, the minority is largely powerless to do anything but protest. Senate Republicans at least have the power to filibuster, which helps explain why they are so adamantly opposed to the Democrats’ gambit.” It now reads that way in the online version, as well.

Ms. Steinhauer added that she would have appreciated the opportunity to explain what happened to Mr. Fallows.

On Michele Bachmann and the Vaccine for Cervical Cancer. A less clear case arises from a reader, Ira Glasser, who writes about what he sees as false equivalency in a recent Health section piece about the HPV vaccine. He writes:

The article quotes Michele Bachmann as saying that the vaccine “could have ‘dangerous side effects,’” followed immediately by “a concern that health officials say is unfounded.” If there is a legitimate dispute about side effects, this is hardly an informative way of dealing with it. If there isn’t, why is this sentence there? My concern is the tendency of modern journalism to reflect “balance” by counterposing wholly noncredible claims from wholly noncredible sources with counterclaims by credible sources.

I agree with his overall concerns but not entirely with this specific example. Given the Minnesota congresswoman’s prominence - and the widespread coverage given to her statements during the presidential primary campaign last year â€" including a brief mention of her in this piece seems reasonable to me. And the debunking by health officials does the job of stating an established truth.

At any rate, it’s good that Mr. Glasser was watching closely. I’m glad to be hearing more from readers about avoiding false balance. Nothing is more important in journalism, after all, than getting to the truth.

A Russian-American Photographing Native Alaska

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

The black-and-white photograph taken in Killisnoo, Alaska, at the turn of the 20th century depicts a group of fishermen reeling in a gigantic halibut. The image is lighthearted and almost comical: workers smile as the imposing creature writhes perilously close to them.

What makes the photograph (Slide 5) unusual is not its subject matter but its subjects. The fishermen, working in apparent harmony, represent a cross section of the population of Killisnoo, an island off southeastern Alaska that was an important outpost for American businesses and tourism. Several of the men are white; at least two are Native American, members of the Tlingit community; and one is Asian. Taken at a time when racial integration was the exception and not the rule in the United States, the image by Vincent Soboleff, a Russian-American amateur photographer, is noteworthy.

As the Dartmouth anthropologist Sergei A. Kan argues in his new book, “A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country: Vincent Soboleff in Alaska” (University of Oklahoma Press), Mr. Soboleff’s images of the United States territory, especially its Native population, are also significantly different from others of the period.

Mr. Soboleff, who was born in Killisnoo in 1882, the son of the town’s well-regarded Russian Orthodox priest (Slide 9), set out to document his community almost as soon as he commandeered his family’s small Kodak camera as a teenager. His project ended in the late 1910s, when the need to help support his family after the death of his father drove him to seek more gainful employment, first as a postal worker and later as the owner of a popular general store and movie theater. While Mr. Soboleff later made some of his photographs into hand-tinted postcards and permitted a handful of local business to use his images as logos, he remained disengaged from the medium until his death in 1950.

Mr. Soboleff approached his subjects familiarly, with youthful enthusiasm. Nevertheless, he was reasonably knowledgeable about Native social organization, ceremonial life and history, a facility aided by his close relationship with the Tlingit community and his ability to speak its language fluently.

His pictures are competent but not artful or studied, unlike the work of more commercial photographers of Alaska’s Native population, like William Case and Horace Draper. This informality was part of his unconventional point of view. He rarely staged photographs or posed his subjects, favoring natural settings and straightforward depictions of everyday life and customs.

As 19th-century Native Americans were forced to adapt to a world dynamically altered by war, racial brutality, disease and displacement, photographic depictions of them habitually trafficked in stereotypes built on an implicit comparison between the new, “civilized” Indian and the tradition-bound “savage.” Mr. Soboleff’s pictures were more respectful of, and ultimately more informative about, his subjects, despite the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church, which began working in Alaska in the mid-18th century, was actively proselytizing in the Tlingit community.

The contents of Mr. Soboleff’s archive, some 780 plate negatives donated to the Alaska State Library by his sister in 1968, suggest that he was interested in capturing a wide-ranging view of life in Alaska. His photographs depict local buildings and landscapes, maritime culture, and the Tlingit, Russian-American, European-American and Asian-American residents of Killisnoo and a nearby town, Angoon. Mr. Kan’s rigorous study focuses on the pictures of people, particularly scenes of work, celebration and play, as well as of the interface between Native and non-Native populations.

This interaction was not as sanguine as it first appears in the photos. On the surface, Killisnoo seems like a racial paradise. Tlingit and Russian-American men labor together in factories, and the Russian-Americans, then referred to as Creoles and seen as not quite white by the nation at large, seem to be more empathetic to the plight of their Native co-workers. A leader of the Russian Orthodox Church poses with a Tlingit aristocrat in traditional Native ceremonial vestments. White and Native villagers participate in a Fourth of July celebration.

But closer inspection of that last image reveals disharmony. Although the white men are active participants, their Native counterparts are relegated to the sidelines as passive spectators. While workers of all races did labor together, Mr. Kan says, their leisure time was often spent apart: a number of photographs depict whites hunting, fishing, boating, hiking and playing in a small orchestra, largely without their Tlingit co-workers. Even in employment, integration went only so far. Jobs requiring specialized technical knowledge were restricted to whites.

Mr. Soboleff’s intimate portraits, especially of Tlingit aristocrats, are his most visually compelling images. The aesthetics of these photographs reside less in their formal or stylistic mastery and more in the artfulness of their subjects and environment. Such images afforded a culturally marginalized people an uncommon opportunity to represent themselves as they wanted to be seen, surrounded by stunning artifacts, especially the ceremonial objects and garments bearing the crests of individual clans.

Instead of transforming his subjects into exotic and anonymous icons, the 19th-century standard for images of American Indians, Mr. Soboleff treated them as individuals, identifying many by name in his captions. His subjects were also solicitous: “Local clan leaders, like most Tlingit people in general, were quite fond of being photographed,” Mr. Kan writes, valuing the images as “permanent proof of their high rank and status” or of the richness of their lives.

“Try putting yourself inside these photos,” writes Edwin Schupman, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and an educator at the National Museum of the American Indian, and “you might begin to understand the world from their points of view.” Mr. Schupman speaks to the importance of empathy in interpreting photos of Native peoples. For Mr. Soboleff, an honorary citizen of Tlingit country, an intimate understanding of his subjects was an important prerequisite for photographing them as well.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. He is the author of 11 books, including a memoir, “White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness.” He curated a show, “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” and contributed essays to “Gordon Parks: Collected Works” (Steidl, 2013).

Follow @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.