What is the difference between objectivity and fairness when it comes to journalism? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

In my view, “objectivity” is pretty easy to construe as “avoiding independent judgment,” which is a promise that simply cannot be kept—the way writing works requires it.

Fairness, to me, involves trying to do two things. The first is to treat the people who are the subject of the story in the way that I would hope to be treated if people were writing about or quoting me. I wouldn’t want them necessarily to agree with me, but I’d like my ideas to be presented reasonably accurately, so that readers could decide for themselves. And I’d hope to avoid what we in the business call “drive-bys”—those little glancing swipes that are meant to communicate “edginess.”

The second part of fairness is treating the reader fairly. This means giving the reader the tools to think. Example: There have been a zillion articles in the last two years about scientists worrying about whether Antarctica will break up and melt in the next few decades. Most of this is based on a very good paper by DeConto and Pollard. Almost none of those articles take the trouble to explain why the two men think Antarctica is more vulnerable than had been previously thought. It’s exasperating — not least because the mechanism seems plausible, and if spelled out might communicate the reason for alarm very well.

Second, those same articles then try to spell out the consequences. The way this is usually done is in terms of four models of the future put out by the IPCC, which are in turn based on four models from the 1990s. People stick with the models because they have become standards. The most extreme one is called RCP8.5. It was created in the 1990s to illustrate the possibilities of unbridled climate change. To do this, the modelers assumed that, e.g., coal consumption would go up ten-fold by 2100, there would be no mitigation efforts, and the world’s population would be 12 billion. Well, none of that is likely now, but researchers still continue to use RCP8.5 because it, along with the other models, are standards. That’s totally OK! But when science journalists use those projections in their articles without the caveats that is not playing fair with the reader. And this happens all the time. It’s exasperating.

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