What is fair?

Just the question alone might remind you of an academic exercise, where you spend a semester politely discussing the issue.

In a fairly heated election year like this one, however, the matter of what’s fair is entirely different, and can lead to heated words.

Seconds after that, what should be an intellectual exchange might become a back-and-forth bit of ugly threats, and...

Perhaps some talk of your mother’s heritage, then maybe a beer bottle upside the head.

So that brings us to the obvious puzzle: How in the hell did we descend to this point of puffy red faces and very little reasoning?

Weren’t we discussing “fairness,” after all?

Well, yes.

But one man’s reasonable analysis is another’s angry tirade... as you’ve probably noticed unless you’ve been on a scientific expedition deep into an Angolan mine or measuring glacier creep in Antarctica.

EARLIER this week, Press opinion columnist Sholeh Patrick wrote a wonderful piece on the struggle to achieve balance — and how we (especially media folk) bang against walls because of one essential problem.

Quick side note: Sholeh has a fascinating writing style, which almost certainly is a product of her combined expertise in both law and academia.

It perhaps could be summed up like this: “You are an exceptionally nice person, and we should enjoy dinner sometime. But while your thoughts on this issue are interesting, sadly they can be proven wrong — both scientifically and from simple A+B logic — before the tea kettle even begins to whistle.”

No old newspaper hack in his or her right mind (me, for instance), is going to challenge Sholeh’s heavily researched conclusions without a platoon of Nobel Prize winners waiting out in the car with a stack of signed affidavits.

What I’m hoping to do here is take Sholeh’s obviously sound observations and see how they can be applied to a media industry in which technology has become more and more of both a wonderful help and a screaming hindrance.

THE CLEAR difficulty that Ms. Patrick pointed out was that most clumsy attempts at balance lead directly in the opposite direction — to a terrible “imbalance” that sends a completely false message.

I’m paraphrasing now, but Sholeh’s point was that giving 30 minutes — or on television, perhaps 30 seconds — to a pair of candidates with opposing views and calling that “balance” likely would turn out to be nonsense.

The whole thing blows apart when one of the two is more knowledgeable, quicker to recognize and explain problems, carrying the benefit of extra experience, blessed with a better temperament, and so on.

These two people are NOT an even match, or anything close to it.

In our attempt at balance, we wind up leveling a playing field that, in the real world, ought to be tilted dramatically — and in fact, should lead to a rout.

There is no question that Sholeh’s observations, and the errors that push us to a misleading result called “false balance,” are painfully accurate.

Here is a paragraph from her column which sums things up pretty well...

“In politics, an example is comparing the negative aspects of two candidates, giving equal weight to minor vs. major deficiencies, so the net effect is an unfair comparison — apples to oranges, or apples to chuck roast.”

YOU CAN see where this might lead us.

Worse, it’s obvious where it might take voters when it comes to choosing people to make critical decisions for Idaho or the United States.

Sholeh is right to warn readers of the inherent dangers involved here. Bending over backward to give the impression of balance can cause exactly the opposite reaction.

So then, leaving out biased media who are bought off almost entirely by one political side or another, what can America’s honest reporters do about this conundrum?

For a start, we need to ignore the notion of “balance” and substitute another word that sounds almost the same — but has a different practical meaning on the street, where real journalism is practiced.

Fairness.

The bedrock on which free press was founded, and fiercely protected in the Constitution, assumed a doctrine of fairness.

As Sholeh proved, balance is an illusion. It’s an attempt to make any two things — human beings or objects in a scientific experiment — equal by artificial means.

That is NOT the point of journalism.

Our role is, yes, to be fair and — in the case of politics — give candidates fair time and context to handle the same questions.

But to be perfectly clear, it is NOT our job to create balance.

We offer opportunities, and often provide readers with background information that busy people don’t have the time to research for themselves.

And then, in the interest of fairness (not balance), we step out of the way and let our readers decide the claims, honesty, knowledge and bona fides of the candidates.

The bottom line is that the public will be electing candidates and making critical decisions anyway.

So fairness is simply giving them a clear look at people and issues, and trusting that the public will become informed enough to make good decisions.

We aren’t in the balancing business, for all the reasons Ms. Patrick pointed out.

But fairness?

Absolutely.

It is the first and most important job of a free press, and we need to remind ourselves of it — every minute of every day.

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Steve Cameron is a special assignment reporter for The Press. Reach Steve at scameron@cdapress.com.