Media expert: How to spot journalistic bias
Charges of favoritism in the Fourth Estate are nothing new, but the intensity and transparency of Orwellian partisanship, especially in the local digital realm, have hit hilarious new highs. Veteran journalist and media critic Mark Lisheron provided Opp Now readers with a handy guide for identifying that bias in March 2021; and his insights are even more relevant today.
There are myriad ways to detect bias in the news you read.
Headlines. This might be changing with the rise of boutique news websites, but in most bigger operations, the people writing the headlines are editors, not the people who wrote the stories. In a teeming market, headline writers will top a story with a grabber that has only a tenuous connection to the story. Never trust a headline on its own.
Story Placement. We’ve been trained by repetition to expect that the story at the top of the webpage or the Six O’Clock News is the most important story of the day. Have you ever wondered why a story that doesn’t seem to be big is in that slot? Or why a story you think should be in that spot is tucked in a little bitty corner or given a link to another page? Just wondering is reason enough to try to find an answer somewhere else.
Context. In the heat of reporting a story on deadline, there is sometimes no opportunity to provide some connection to the event you’re covering and the bigger picture. It seems important that Chief Garcia, who got hammered for excessive force during the rioting, was the architect of a training program that had previously delivered an actual reduction in excessive force cases. It might also have been helpful to point out to readers that Silicon Valley De-Bug and its founder Raj Jayadev have a long history of community activism and a sometimes vehement opposition to Garcia. They are hardly dispassionate observers of what was happening on the streets.
Numbers, statistics and studies. Human beings gin these things up, usually for someone who pays them to produce them. Just because they were created does not make them inviolate. It’s important to know the background of the people and institutions producing data because it will help you understand why they are producing them. And here’s where the context thing comes in. The producer of news controls which numbers, statistics and studies to use and which to ignore. Sometimes it’s more important to know what’s been left out.
Why. I’ve told young reporters, journalism students, family and friends that of all the Ws you’re taught in J-school to respect, the Why has always been my guiding star. The Why gave me the opportunity to get better at my job, to ask better questions, to look broader and deeper at my subjects. Asking Why will also make you a more critical and demanding reader. It also prodded me to ask why stories are created and presented the way they are now. The too-short answer is that the news business is, at root, a business, something to which journalists in every generation have not reconciled themselves. Many still think the New York Times publishes “All the News That’s Fit to Print” when they are actually doing the best job in the country delivering All the News Their Subscribers Demand.
Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
Image by Wikimedia Commons