Is the New York Times biased? Is Fox News biased? If your answer is not “Obviously!” on both accounts, odds are pretty good you’re biased.
Then again, who isn’t? Show me someone without bias, and I’ll show you someone who is utterly apathetic. Only when something means nothing to us are we likely not to have a biased opinion.
We all have opinions, we all have beliefs that we consider truer than others. This isn’t a Bad Thing, it’s just how things are. I’m biased in favor of liberty, and I write about it here. Frequently. Verbosely. Sometimes vehemently.
I look to defend my opinions with arguments and logic chains rooted in a combination of philosophy and empirical evidence. Those who disagree will hopefully rebut in a similar fashion. This leads to conversation, to the testing of arguments and logic chains, and possibly to shifts or improvements in opinion or in the arguments that support them. This is all a Good Thing. It’s the marketplace of ideas in action.
I don’t have an opinion on everything. If you asked me if I prefer East Coast or West Coast rap, I’d shrug my shoulders because I have no idea about either and could not discern one from the other. So, it’s unlikely you’ll find an opinion piece written by me on that question, here or elsewhere. Does that reflect a bias? Sure. It indicates that my musical tastes go in a different direction. Is it a problem that I don’t write about East Coast vs West Coast on my blog? Not in the least. This is an opinion site.
The same cannot be said to be true about news organizations. News organizations have opinion departments, and their media output has opinion sections, but that is not the sum total of what they purport to be. The New York Times’ motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Fox News’ motto is “Fair and Balanced.” Both suggest that a reader can rely on them to provide proper coverage of the important news of the day.
How many of you believe that you could get all the important news of the day from one or the other? How many of you believe that you can get all the important news of the day from one but not from the other? If you believe the latter, you are either naive, only interested in hearing the news that fits your ideological bias, or lying. The first of those three possibilities can be fixed. The second is a personal choice. I don’t agree with it, but I respect it as honest. The third is both repugnant and insulting. Choose, if you wish, to keep yourself informed solely from sources that match your bias, but don’t insult everyone else’s intelligence by claiming your choice keeps you fully informed.
Here is the reality. All the major news organizations reflect organizational bias. They may claim that they restrict bias to their opinion pages, and keep their news pages free of opinion, but the news content itself is governed by bias. Somewhere in the process, editors decide what news is, in the words of the NY Times, “fit to print.” They decide what’s newsworthy, what deserves space on their pages and their websites, and what doesn’t. Certainly, there can be disagreement as to whether a toddler’s dropped ice cream cone deserves to be reported, but some stories are newsworthy by any objective standard. If Source A puts a big story on its front page, but Source B hides it on page 37, or worse, doesn’t print it at all, which source is less “biased?”
Trick question. There’s always bias. Even if every source in the country front-pages the same story, the coverage will reflect the source’s leanings. But, that’s not so bad. Once you acknowledge the inevitability of bias, you can read in a discerning and critical fashion, glean the information that’s important to you, and decide if you agree or disagree with the proferred slant. The far bigger sin that of omission. If a source doesn’t cover a story, it is deciding for its readers what’s important to them. Instead of saying “here’s our take on a story,” it’s “we’re not going to tell you this story because we don’t want you to form an opinion we don’t agree with.” News, even if presented in a biased fashion, fulfills the obligation a news source has in purporting to be a news source. Editorial omission, on the other hand, is an abandonment of the implied agreement between news provider and news consumer. It’s wrong, and it’s more wrong than stealthily editorializing what’s presented as dispassionate news reporting.
It’s also, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it’s here to stay. All we can do as consumers is recognize that it’s happening and act accordingly. No one should rely solely on one source for news of a contentious nature. There’s no need to cross-check the NY Times, the NY Post, the NY Daily News, ESPN, Fox Sports AND MLB.com to get last night’s Mets score. The fact that a game was or may have been played is already known to readers who care, and no news organization that wants to stay in business is going to lie about the outcome or pretend it didn’t happen. That’s not what I’m talking about here, and you understand that. News that’s political, that’s scientific or pseudo-scientific, that’s educational, or that goes beyond “I knew this was happening, so tell me the raw facts” is invariably subject to editorializing by suppression or omission. Certainly, it’s harder to hit half a dozen different news sources than to simply rely on one, and no one is obligated to conform to my or any other’s suggestions regarding news immersion. We should, however, be honest with ourselves, and recognize that the sources we prefer are not the end-all. We should know that they’re all going to choose what they share, and we should not pretend to be fully informed if we only rely on them.
As for the omitters themselves? They should be embarrassed by their mottoes and by their lack of ethic, but life is not a journalism class, and they do what they do for their own reasons and purposes. Their sins of omission are, unlike Hebrew National hot dogs, not subject to a higher authority.
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There used to be something called “journalism”, which near as I can tell was a set of standards of conduct meant to offset people’s natural biases and — to some extent — compensate for organizational bias as well. Some columnists, e.g. James Taranto, are always talking about this as if it should matter. My researches tell me, however, that most of the media either hasn’t heard of this concept, or has decided that it’s too quaint a concept for them.
Oddly enough, though, I find myself drawn to those few in the media who seem to be adhering to this quaint and laughable custom, e.g. folks like Jake Tapper and Greta van Susteren, and to the patron saint of the concept, James Taranto. Maybe it’s something our academians could benefit from studying too.
🙂
Indeed that used to be the case, Karl. However, instead of teaching those precepts, Journalism schools and their students have embraced the notion of ‘making a difference’ as their reason d’etre – and we’re seeing the results. PS – Agree, but Taranto gets a pass IMHO, as he’s an editorialist, not a reporter – so I think he’s role appropriate.