The "News" with Katie Couric

Tonight, Katie Couric makes her long-anticipated debut for the CBS Evening News. After many years with Today on NBC, Katie makes the jump to primetime anchor, a dream of most television news journalists.

While I am happy for anyone who gets a job offer such as this, one of the commercials airing about her debut concerns me. Katie tells us that CBS will be giving us the facts we need and will make us think, “I’ve never thought about it that way before.”

I agree with the first part of that. The job of the news should be to give us the facts. We need to know what happened in any story. Names, dates, locations, contact information and other important items need to be given so we can know the news.

However, admitting that we will think about things differently? That may not be what CBS wants to admit. By saying such, they are admitting bias. Seeing the news should not get us to change our thinking about something unless we had not been given all the facts in the first place. We should be allowed to make up our own minds about stories, not have the news present us with something they want.

Sadly, though, that’s the way the news is most often given. We have gone away from true journalism to reporting with a bias. While there will always be bias (they get to decide what stories to report and what not to report), we need to seek ways for our journalists to keep from bias within a story. CBS seems to be going away from that idea.