Cherry picking in journalism is a practice where a journalist discovers facts, data, or quotes to support a viewpoint, and ignores information that contradicts that viewpoint. This can create a biased narrative that distorts reality through selective reporting, and ignores all other aspects that provide the complete picture of a situation.
Key details:
- Selective presentation:
Cherry picking goes beyond cherry picking. It uses support to find pieces of information that support a certain conclusion, to ensure that anything that contradicts the premise the cherry-pickers started out with is ignored or suppressed. - Bias/disinformation:
Sometimes cherry picking is also used to present a certain view/agenda. Cherry picking in these situations can distort the information presented to make the misleading case for the viewpoint in question. - Context:
By cherry picking journalists often fail to produce important contextual information that helps to inform an audience into what is actually happening and allows an audience to arrive at an informed opinion. Thus if a journalist engages in cherry picking, they are actually providing an incomplete picture of the nature of a particular situation by failing to demonstrate its complexity. - Ethics:
Cherry picking is regarded as unethical because it violates the spirit of journalistic integrity, ethical terms that stipulate objectivity (in journalism this means impartial), fairness, and accuracy within a story. - Examples:
- A news article highlights negative impacts of a certain policy, however ignores all of the policies positive outcomes.
- A political campaign highlights quotes from a source that only highlight favorable outcomes while ignoring a plethora of other outcomes that contradict or otherwise reinforce the opposite.
- An advertisement that cites data to support its claims, only presents a select few pieces of data, while ignoring a multitude of other data that might contradict its claims.
