It’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.
Yeah, nobody ever does it perfectly. But trying to do it right rather than trying to do it wrong surely means that you'll come closer to doing it right.
"Feelings don't care about your facts." — not Ben Shapiro
Who won the 2020 US presidential election? If viewers think it was A and you report that it was B, will they believe you? Will they continue to watch/read you? If not, what does that do to your revenue and ability to pay your bills?
As Jason Zweig wrote:
> There are three ways to make a living: 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
You don’t have to put a spin on the news to bias it. You just report or fail to report the news that goes or doesn’t go with your agenda.
But reporters' time and effort are still a constraint.
And if you spend (more) time on story A but readers are interested in B and don't generate review via views/clicks, that affects the ability to pay your bills.
Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election?
Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to establish a homestead after the horrible experience of the Shoah?
Is Russia freeing the upstanding people of Ukraine from a tyrannical Nazi regime, or attacking a foreign country out of imperialistic greed?
You will find many groups of people are absolutely certain that one side of these examples is the objective truth.
Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight the election results (or something to that effect, I don't have an exact quote to hand), and that a group of people were protesting and then went past the security barrier to enter the Capitol. You can interpret those facts in different ways (as your question shows), but either interpretation admits the same facts.
As one of my favorite youtube creators, Feral Historian, put it: "Most of the time, people equate the facts and their particular way of connecting them. Most political arguments are about the lines, not the dots. We think our opponents are ignoring the facts when they're just seeing different relationships between them". I think he's spot on with this observation, and one must be extremely careful to delineate between objective fact and the conclusions one draws based on facts. The latter are not objective, even if we feel very strongly that they are obviously correct.
This ties into my original point. Once you can’t verify what happened and are reporting your deductions, you are invariably introducing your opinions. I would prefer to read “we don’t know what exactly happened, but what we do know is X” rather than “we know X, therefore Y must also be true” without any way to actually verify Y.
Let us try something simpler: is the world round or flat?