The past two weeks (till July 15)

The past week at Poynter is so interesting that I almost forget what I did in the first week (forgive me).
In early July, I published a very short story on an economic index indicating the bottoming out of the mid-American economy. It has become a routine job for me, since I've done a similar one when the monthly index came out in early June. Not much to learn from it, also because it's too short. No space for me to write more and think more.
Before I left for Poynter, as usual, I read the newspapers, both print and online, when I had nothing to do. What I have focused was the Xinjiang incident in China, where the Uighurs and Han people were involved in mass killing. I read various reports from US publications to see from what angle they have tackled the topic and whether they have been "balanced" and "unbiased'. It's very important not for that I want to criticize them for alleged "bias" or "imbalance", but to learn from them how to avoid any problems in my future writing when it comes to such topics as Sino-US relations.
I found that many reports simply were technically flawed by quoting only one side and ignoring the other. Sometimes they quote the underquoted side simply to rebutt it by following it with more quotes from the opposite side. It's not only a bias; it's a purposeful technical crafting so as to achieve a result tilted towards one side.
Reflecting on my own writing in the past, I also made the same "mistake". Indeed, I made similar "mistakes". For example, I sometimes quoted those, although unconsciously, who support China's policies more than those who support US policies when reporting Sino-US economic relations.
Journalism would not promote peace, or virtually anything, in this world if journalists are biased by their own stances.
The reflection is good for both my training goal of business story writing and multimedia reporting, because without being balanced and unbiased, one could neither do good business stories nor quality multimedia reporting. While they try to grasp sophisticated, state-of-the-art techniques and tools, journalists sometimes simply ignore some basic and core values of journalism.