Bias in the media

I was half-listening to an NPR discussion on "bias in the media", "How to Repair the Public's Perception of the Press" and found myself increasingly irritated by the lack of precision in some of the key language used, especially by such senior and respected thinkers in the field. The two worst offences were "bias" and "news" or "news reporting".



Any account of any incident, whether by an eye-witness, a reporter, or even video footage, is affected by those giving the account. Perception is filtered by age, gender, education, experiences, religion, wealth etc etc. This is slant and is normal and is easily identifiable. Bias is a deliberate tilting of the account to favor one position by selectively choosing what is said or what and how it is said. This too is normal and easily identifiable. The problem comes when slant or bias is presented as or is seen as objective fact, and in this case, bias is worse because it is deliberate and intended to mislead.

A related issue is that many of those giving these accounts miss details, perhaps through sloppiness or through being focussed on the foreground and not seeing what is happening in the background. When accidental, this is not bias, it may even be an effect of slant Sloppiness or slant is normal, inevitable and can easily be corrected.

When it is deliberate, it is bias and so will not be corrected. This wolf in sheep's clothing is not something we should accept. It is an attack on our views and philosophies, and its motives must be actively questioned.

The other teeth-tightening misuse is over "news" and "news reporting". Most of what we see today in the media is not reporting, it is commentary. Reporting tells us who, what, where and when as accurately as possible. Commentary is explaining what was reported, what it means and why it matters and being commentary, reflects the views of the commentator and of his/her platform. 

There is nothing wrong with commentary; publications like "The Economist" and "Foreign Affairs" celebrate that this is what they do. It is wrong when commentary is called reporting and when it is presented as objective, and it is more wrong when the underlying report or event or statement is selectively presented, because this is bias.

In part, I blame "the media" in that the different providers are unclear in terms of their positions, or that they are providing commentary rather then reporting. I mostly fault schools and education providers for reducing literature and history programmes where discrimination in reading and analysis is essential, and language classes where analyses of speaker or writer motives and slant/bias were key elements.

Illiteracy is more than not knowing your A, B, Cs.

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Firther reading

Media Slant : A Question of Cause and Effect

What Drives Media Slant (the study cited in the above article - flawed in my opinion in that it doesn't differntiate between unconscious slant and conscious bias)

Three types of bias in resarch (the findings also pply to the media)