When Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei twitted his post, it was immediately clear (to me) that he made a grievous error. It was his ideas on how to restore faith in the media, which matters because Axios is one of those new-fangled media ideas that seems to be catching on, for better or worse. He included an idea for politicians, media, social media companies and “you.”

Since he’s got no say over how anyone behaves outside his own organization, mostly populated by college interns and new humanities grads with a few “name” vets to lend a bit of gravitas, it was his “media” idea that was most notable:

Media: News organizations should ban their reporters from doing anything on social media — especially Twitter — beyond sharing stories. Snark, jokes and blatant opinion are showing your hand, and it always seems to be the left one. This makes it impossible to win back the skeptics.

While noting, unsurprisingly, the left-leaning sympathies of his kids, his “solution” was the problem: don’t be honest in your reporting and, as is the Axios way, provide the dolts with your “takeaway” since one of the core elements of the enterprise is to tell people what the news blurb means to them. No, don’t be. Appear. Appear neutral so as to not “show your hand.” Have your hand, but just don’t show it. If media folk don’t snark or joke, then people will trust them. That’s the answer, per Jim.

And media people wonder why the public lacks faith in them.

But as Karl Bode notes at Techdirt, there is another school of thought reflected by Columbia J-prof Jay Rosen.

For years we’ve talked about the journalistic perils of what journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” or the pretty common misconception that journalists should prioritize factual symmetry in news reporting, instead of actually trying to get to the truth. This usually results in “he said, she said” reporting where both sides are given equal weight (even if one side is clearly being intentionally misleading), with the idea that the reader can then ferret out the truth, while the journalist him or herself stands stoically protected from accusations of “bias” because they refused to take a real stand.

Note up front that Rosen’s argument is that it’s a journalist’s duty to “get to the truth.” It’s not to report the facts, but the truth. Uh oh. Yet, there is an important point in there, that journalists not “prioritize factual symmetry,” the dreaded “view from nowhere,” merely because someone said so.

There was an approach in the media requiring a journalist to provide “both sides” of a story where there was no factual second side. One side would be the facts as found, and the other side would be the other side’s “response.” Journalists believed it to be their obligation to report a second side regardless of what it was, absurd, factless, ridiculous. And the two sides should be treated as legit, even if there was nothing credible about the other side.

This created the sense of equal weight to both sides of the story. You know the old axiom, there are two sides to every story. Except there aren’t always two sides, and yet the news was presented as if there were.

Here’s where it gets tricky: sometimes there are two sides and sometimes there aren’t. How does one figure it out? On what basis does one figure it out? How can one be sure they’ve figured it out and not simply imposed their own bias over the story so that they “truth” they’ve gotten to is “their truth” rather than “the truth”?

This isn’t an epiphany, but had once been a core journalistic concern.

During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help.

It wasn’t enough to tell “who, what, where, when and how,” if the reader might draw the wrong conclusion from the facts. Journalists were schooled in their duty to guide the groundlings, who might not be wise enough to realize who was awful.

That journalists possessed neither the expertise nor magic to know any better than anyone else right from wrong, truth from fiction, eluded them. They were taught to report, yet believed they were the arbiters of good and evil, wielding their pen in support of the downtrodden, even when the afflicted might not be in the right and the comfortable not quite wrong.

Between Jim VandeHei’s solution, “be biased but appear neutral” and Jay Rosen’s “speak truth to power” approach is a spectrum of possibilities, but they seem to have sailed over Karl Bode’s head. What is wrong with verifying facts? Not truth, but facts. If one side proffers as fact something that isn’t fact, then that should be reported as part of the story. But if it is fact, don’t hide it, bury it, deny it, because it doesn’t serve your truth. When there are two sides to a story, even when it’s the story you want to tell, it’s just as dishonest to conceal the facts supporting the side you hate as it is to report lies as facts.

What this comes down to is a matter of integrity, the willingness to admit, to yourself and others, that sometimes the other side may be right, or at least may have a point. If you can’t see it, if you can never see it, or even if you just can’t bring yourself to say it because it conflicts with what you’re certain is the truth, then you’re why people have no faith in the news media.