Bias and the news: A primer

With the 2024 presidential election looming, now is a good time to talk about bias and the news. I have worked as a reporter, and I have taught journalism courses for nearly 50 years. In my JRN 101 course at Miami, I always started my lecture on bias this way:

All news is biased. News, after all, is primarily selective storytelling, not objective science.  Editors choose certain events to cover and reject others; reporters choose particular words or images to use and ignore others. The news is also biased in favor of storytelling, drama and conflict; in favor of “telling two sides of a story” (although there may be multiple sides or only one); in favor of powerful and well-connected sources; in favor of something that just happened; and in favor of practices that serve journalism’s space and time constraints.

Most readers and viewers don’t usually focus on these kinds of professional biases and limitations. Instead we obsess over political bias. And in our current partisan landscape, it is very difficult to move people away from their political tribes and information bubbles, to seek out other points of view.

Why? Confirmation bias.

This type of bias is what psychologists define as the strong tendency to seek opinions (not necessarily facts) that affirm — or confirm — what we already believe. In a world in which most of us get our “news” and information first from friends, family and Facebook, it takes hard work to consider opinions and ideas outside our comfort zones. It is also hard work to fact-check the material that informs everything from a news report to an opinion column. That’s the job good journalists are trained to do.

Add to this that we no longer share a similar set of facts based on watching the same national or local news or reading the same morning newspaper. These media habits, undone by the internet and social media, once provided a communal set of facts and information from which we could make judgments about our towns and our world.

Nicholas Negroponte wrote about this 30 years ago in his book “Being Digital.” He coined the phrase the “Daily Me,” predicting that digital technology would allow us to customize and personalize how we get our information each day when we log on to our laptops or boot up our phones.

In the novel “Happiness Falls,” Angie Kim’s protagonist points to another obstacle in moving people off their set beliefs:  “the anchoring bias, people’s tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we get on any topic.” If we get those first pieces of information from an early morning Facebook or Twitter rant, it takes some kind of heroic effort to search out more legitimate sources to fact-check the ocean of opinion posts that wash over us daily.

In our current partisan era, social media, radio and cable pundits pronounce on all sorts of positions, but often with little or no evidence or on-site reporting to verify or ground their opinions. In “The Elements of Journalism,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel call such punditry “the journalism of assertion,” characterized by a toxic public sphere that “has become an arena solely for polarized debate, not for compromise, consensus and solution.” They contrast this with “the journalism of verification,” characterized by disciplined reporting: citing reliable sources and documenting evidence.

Since journalists are primarily storytellers, and not scientists, searching for political bias should not be the main focus for critiquing the news. Under time and space constraints, journalists do the daily work covering their communities and converting events into news reports. After all, much of what we learn about the world, especially outside our community, comes from the work of  reporters. News reports will always contain biases, given the human imperfection in communicating through the lenses and limits of language and images.

To critique a news story, we should be asking: Was the story useful or significant? Did the story represent an issue’s complexity? Did it provide documentation? Did it represent multiple viewpoints by seeking out a variety of sources? Kovach and Rosenstiel argue that “the primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing” and that the stories reporters tell “must make the significant interesting and relevant.”

As the election approaches and we try to sort wheat from chaff, let’s remember our nation was not founded on an objective press but on a partisan model. Our nation’s early newspapers were intensely partisan, subsidized by political parties, rivaling the social media venom of today. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson ran newspapers that constantly attacked one another. Newspapers referred to George Washington at various times as a “a horse beater,” “a dictator,” “a most horrid swearer and blasphemer,” “a spoiled child,” and “a tyrannical monster.” And then there’s my personal favorite from Philadelphia’s Aurora General Advertiser in 1796: “If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by WASHINGTON.”

Still, in the name of democracy, the founders had the good sense to protect only one business enterprise in the Constitution — the press. 

Richard Campbell is a professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism & Film at Miami University.