‘Balanced’ journalist pushes politician’s lie to prove they don’t have a ‘pro-fact’ bias

Local journalist Sam Smugington has patted herself on the back after a ‘fantastically balanced’ article that just repeats the blatant lies of a politician without any fact-checking, or ‘pro-fact bias’ as she calls it.

Smugington told our writers that journalism is about “fighting truth to power”, but luckily it is safe to assume that a politician would never be anything but completely honest and upfront, so doing anything other than just copy and pasting their talking points into an article would be a waste of everyone’s time.

“One example of my strive for balance was when a politician announced that he will power the entire country using genetically enhanced hamsters running on wheels at super speed, which he said he could purchase at ‘mates rates’ only costing a slab of beer. Clearly when given claims like that, the best thing to do is rush as fast as those hamsters to put out an article about how we are definitely getting the hamsters.”

“Well then of course after a few days of articles about how the hamsters are coming while those nagging experts reckoned they ‘didn’t exist’, I ended up writing a thoughtful piece about the ‘hamster debate’ and how the worst thing in politics is when politicians argue about things that shouldn’t be politicised, like super powered hamsters.”

Smugington seemed hopeful she might even win a journalism award for the time she put in the ‘extra yards’ by not only putting a politician’s entire press release into her article, but also going so far as to add in a couple random tweets she found to the article to pretend that those tweets reflect an actual discussion on the issue at hand.