(My Bias) Regarding Bias

by beatvibe

Posted to Poetry and Politics on 2004-06-27 15:40:00

Parent message is 668659

Journalism is inherently biased — not inherently objective.

Bias is not something that threatens to “creep” in and slant a story. Rather, it is something that is already there from word one. It can be tempered, but it cannot be removed.

Objectivity is the Holy Grail that journalists strive for, but this is a theoretical standard that can never be realized in a true sense. Instead, we have degrees of objectivity, or even “relative” objectivity. Journalists might be regarded as “interpreters” who can’t help but interject their own accent, not to mention losing something in translation. At the very least, all stories suffer the “bias of omission” (that which is left unsaid). If a news organization doesn’t recognize this — i.e., if they proclaim themselves to be bias-free (e.g., “fair and balanced”) — then they have a problem.

Part of this issue is the notion of “truth” in reporting. There are different schools of thought, but I’ll relate one approach: As a reporter, your job is to report. If you ask someone what time it is and they say 3 o’clock, then you ask someone else and they say 4 o’clock, your job is not to find out what time it really is. You simply report that Person A said it’s 3 o’clock, and Person B said it’s 4 o’clock. The moment you go beyond this, you’re adding your own perspective. You are no longer reporting a story — you are becoming part of it. (In this sense, “investigative reporting” is a marketing sham, and most reporters I know resent doing these types of features).

Consider the top item currently on cnn.com. One paragraph reads as follows: “Two car bombs exploded near a mosque, killing 40 people and wounding 22 others Saturday night in the southern Iraqi city of Hillah, a coalition military official said.” Now, by saying this, is CNN reporting that 40 people were killed and 22 were wounded? No. They are only reporting what “a coalition military official said.” It’s unlikely that the reporter can know these details firsthand, so he or she must qualify it in presentation. In part, this is simply a matter of accuracy, but it’s also done so that the audience can consider the source and make their own decisions about any “truth” behind these statements. We don’t really know what happened. All we have is a “report.”

So the idea of “bias” is often tied to the idea of “truth.” If reporting fits with an observer’s general framework, then they tend to regard it as “unbiased” because there doesn’t appear to be any conflict. But if it challenges that framework, then it tends to appear slanted or skewed. Because there is no universal “truth,” bias is unavoidable.

When Jennings said, “we all bring baggage to the table,” he was responding to an observation King made regarding bias. And just prior to that, Jennings remarked, “I think bias in the generic sense exists all the time.” So, yes, I definitely take that as an admission that it affects his own journalism. How could he possibly exclude himself from such statements?

I quote from Rhetorica.net’s page on journalistic bias (which details nine distinct types of bias inherent in journalism)…

“There is no such thing as an objective point of view… The journalistic ethics of objectivity and fairness are a strong influence on the profession. But journalistic objectivity is not the pristine objectivity of philosophy… [and] the ethical heights journalists set for themselves are not always reached… The press is often thought of as a unified voice with a distinct bias (right or left depending on the critic). [It]…is possible to find evidence — anecdotal and otherwise — to ‘prove’ media bias of one stripe or another. Far more … instructive is studying the inherent, or structural, biases of journalism as a professional practice…

“Those who complain most about media bias would see themselves as able to identify it and resist it. They get upset about it because they question whether the average American is able to do the same.”


NOTE: The issues behind reporting casualties are very complex, and I obviously can’t speak for any news organization currently making these decisions. But — factual or otherwise — these details clearly spin the larger story. They are not being provided because they are “unbiased news.”