“…With their tongues they keep deceiving…” – Romans 13:3b
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed.” — Academy Award Winner Denzel Washington
(Interestingly, Washington was quoting Mark Twain, who had concluded the same some 100 years ago. So, it seems media bias is nothing new!)
1. What is bias?
According to Dictionary.com, the first definition for “bias” (noun) is: a particular tendency, trend, inclination, feeling, or opinion, especially one that is preconceived or unreasoned.
(Note: the adj. form is “biased,” as in “biased language, biased reporting,” etc.)
2. Does everyone have biases?
In short, yes.
In my years of teaching, I have tried to educate my students about bias, especially its pervasiveness and toxicity. Now, not all bias is bad. For example, one might say: “I have a bias that hard work pays off.” (This is another way of saying, “in my personal belief system, a person should work hard, because it will pay off in the end.”)
But in general, bias is seen as a negative trait– so much so, that the word “bias” has a negative connotation.
Over the years I have also told my students that since bias comes from our way of looking at the world, we all have our biases. So it is important that we be aware of our biases and seek to rein them in. (One of my best memories from my teaching career which began in 1986 came the day when a colleague of mine said he had been teaching his 10th graders about bias. He told his class, “We ALL have our biases,” when one female student, whom I had taught in 9th grade, corrected him. “Not Mr. Dreyer,” she protested. “He tells us the truth.” Hearing that she had said that about my teaching was a special moment in my career.)
3. What is “media bias”?
The subject of bias is so deep and complex, books have been written on it. I do not pretend to offer an all-encompassing discussion of the subject in this one blog post. And due to time and space limits, this post will focus on bias in the U.S. news media. To learn more, and speaking of books, I encourage you to read Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. It was an eye-opener for me and changed how I now view news and observe word choice.
For decades, much of the U.S. news industry has had a left-wing, pro-Democrat Party bias, or favoritism. In recent years, Fox News and Talk Radio has offered a conservative counter-balance to it. This cartoon makes fun of the “slant” that much of the news media has.
This cartoon (on the far right) by Christopher Weyant came out during the Trump impeachment in November 2019. It makes fun of the way TV news channels not so much REPORT what has happened, but by twisted and biases reporting actually CREATE A FALSE NARRATIVE, based on the impression the reporters and editors want the viewers to have. In this cartoon of the man in the bar, “the [TV channels] where Trump’s guilty” refers to almost all news channels: CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC. In contrast, “the one where Trump’s innocent” refers to the only main conservative TV channel, Fox News.
We usually associate bias with language, word choice, inflection of tone, etc. Some might think “text can be biased, but maps, charts and graphs can’t be biased, right? Visuals only tell us the truth, right?”
Wrong.
For example, look at these two maps: They are both of the US 2016 presidential election– by state, and by county. BOTH show election results, but do you see the difference? What impact does that difference have on you, the viewer? So, even wordless MAPS can show bias, by what information they present, and how!
I find this graphic useful and honest: it shows a wide variety of popular news sources, across the political spectrum, from left to right. (source)
Many on the left seek to create a fake “aura” or “consensus” that their views are “correct, normal, mainstream.” This is done so that conservative views, in contrast, seem “weird, extreme or ‘out-there.'” For example, this “media bias chart” I disagree with. It claims all the sources inside the green box are “news,” but I think they all have some biases. Plus, it labels the middle of the green rectangle as “Mainstream (minimal partisan bias)” but I strongly disagree. The graphic places CBS, ABC, NBC, The Washington Post and The New York Times in that “minimum partisan bias” category. Yet, they place Fox News on the far right as “somewhat reliable.” Some similar graphics place Fox News inside the Red Rectangle labeled as “nonsense–damaging to public discourse.”
As I see it, Fox News should be as far right of center as CNN is left of center, but this graphic labels CNN as mainly inside the Green Rectangle–“Reliable–Fair interpretation of the news.” (source)
4. Was there a specific time you realized this is a huge problem?
Yes. It was the fall of 1987. I had graduated from the College of William and Mary that May, and had just launched my first teaching career–US history and German language–at a public high school in Richmond, Virginia. Two wonderful relatives–a husband and wife–who lived in Richmond near the school allowed me to reside with them during my two years in Richmond. This let me save a boatload of money and get my financial life off to a strong start.
I can still remember sitting at their dining room table, overlooking a creek in their backyard, when I needed a large table space to spread out and do school work, lesson planning, grade entry, etc. (Note: 1987 was long before the advent of the internet, so all this school work was done with paper and pen.)
The couple had a radio in their dining room and we often listened to the news. On July 31 of that year, President Reagan had nominated Judge Robert Bork to join the US Supreme Court. Bork was eminently qualified for the job: he had been a Yale Law School professor and judge since 1982. However, Judge Bork was overall a conservative judge; that is, he sought to decide cases according to the Constitution and law, not by his own political beliefs. According to the US Constitution, the president NOMINATES new federal judges and the Senate must vote to APPROVE the nomination. Many Democrats were afraid that Bork would tilt the 9-member Supreme Court too far to the right, so they sprang into attack mode. Within 45 minutes of President Reagan nominating Bork to the Court, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) took the Senate floor to denounce the decision in a televised speech. Kennedy claimed:
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”
That is a withering criticism, and Bork responded: “There was not a line in that speech that was accurate.” For whatever reason, though, the sudden criticism took the Reagan White House by surprise. They dithered and lost several weeks until they bothered to mount an offense to defend their candidate, but by that time a national smear campaign had painted Bork as a right-wing extremist and threat to liberties everywhere.
During those weeks of September and October 1987, I listened to daily news updates on National Public Radio (NPR). Day by day I heard the opposition to Judge Bork led by Sen. Kennedy, but I noticed something. NOT ONCE did I hear the NPR people who did the reporting mention this fact about Sen. Kennedy: In 1969, at age 37 and married, he had driven his car into a Massachusetts pond in the middle of the night and drowned campaign worker 28-year old Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy did not report the crash to the police until 10:00 am the next day. By then, of course no rescue was possible and any alcohol in his blood would have dissipated. As a powerful political family based in Massachusetts, the Kennedys and their allies managed to get Kopechne’s corpse out of town and swiftly buried in Pennsylvania before any autopsy was done. This Chappaquiddick scandal, named after the tiny island where the accident occurred, kept Kennedy from ever becoming president (although he came close in 1980). However, for whatever reason, the voters of Massachusetts kept sending Kennedy back to the US Senate again and again, till he died in 2009. In fact, media commentators loved to call Kennedy “the lion of the Senate.” And thus, Kennedy used his perch in the Senate to keep Bork–a good and decent man–off the Supreme Court…while NPR and all the other major media outlets conveniently never mentioned Chappaquiddick. (For most readers today, 1969 sounds like “ancient history,” but it was only 18 years before the 1987 Bork hearings.) THAT silence from NPR was my “media bias” eye-opener.
(In 2018, Hollywood produced–finally–a movie about this scandal, “Chappaquiddick.” Of course by then, Kennedy was long dead.)
5. What happened when a woman on CBS told the truth?
In September 2018, the US was riveted by Senate confirmation hearings to place Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the US Supreme Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were televised all day, and I was glued to the TV. I was watching CBS, which as I tried to explain above, has a left-of-center bias. That means, their coverage tended to portray Judge Kavanaugh in a negative light. I remember they called their news coverage that morning “The Kavanaugh Controversy” (see below). During the day, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut, pictured below) launched a verbal broadside against Judge Kavanaugh. Later one of the CBS correspondents, Jan Crawford, commented (my paraphrase): I am surprised Judge Kavanaugh did not ask him, “How was your last time in Vietnam, Senator?” because Blumenthal has claimed several times to have served in the Vietnam War, but the actual records show he was never there.
I was shocked to hear a CBS correspondent utter something negative (although true) about a Democrat. Tellingly, the Crawford’s other co-hosts sat silently and then changed the subject.
6. What are some common “tricks” of media bias we should be aware of?
- “Loaded Language” — This shows how important it is to have a strong, robust vocabulary. The better your vocabulary is, the harder it is for people to fool or mislead you with fancy words or “loaded language.” All words have a denotation— that means, the actual, literal, “dictionary” meaning. (Memory tip: remember the “D” in “denotation” and “dictionary.”) For example, “stingy” means “not being generous with one’s money, possessions, or time. However, many words have a connotation too. That means the EMOTIONAL “FEEL” of a word. “Stingy” clearly has a negative connotation. No one wants to be called “stingy.” Once I was in Sunday School and one of my friends told our class: “My wife called me stingy, but I told her I was frugal.” He was joking, but also pointing to a key point. “Stingy” and “frugal” have a similar denotation–both mean “careful or tight with money.” However, “frugal” has a positive connotation. One way to catch media bias is to watch and listen for “loaded language.” Since English has the world’s largest vocabulary of any language and since most words have connotations, there is no way to create an exhaustive list of “loaded words.” Still, here are a few key ones:
Attack: This word has a negative connotation. Just a few days before that debate, the New York Post published a bombshell story claiming Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, had a laptop linking him to illegal foreign payments and corruption. That was a crucial issue and one that the debate should have been discussed, but the media tried to spin it away. Before and around the second presidential debate between Trump – Biden in October 2020, many in the media were speculating: “Will Trump attack Biden’s family?” So, by framing the issue as “Trump attacking Biden’s family,” the media tried to portray Trump as a mean bully and Biden as a victim. The goal was to deflect attention on Biden family corruption.
Controversial (adj.) or controversy (n.) These have negative connotations. As I mentioned above, CBS News’ coverage before Judge Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearings had the huge chyron “The Kavanaugh Controversy.” That very headline put a negative spin on Judge Kavanaugh and helped contribute to the “witch hunt” nature of what Senate Democrats did to him.
Extreme (adj.) This too has a negative connotation. Most people like to think of themselves as “middle of the road” and “reasonable,” so to tack the adjective “extreme” before any idea or name gives it a negative vibe. I have seen political ads on TV where a young adult says, “I could never vote for [candidate x]. He’s too extreme.”
Historic (adj.) This has a positive connotation. This carries the idea of “once in a lifetime” or “making history,” and people want to be a part of it. The media reported countless times in late 2008 about “the historic nature of Barack Obama’s election to the White House.” Who knows how many people were clueless about Candidate Obama’s background, beliefs, or goals for the US, but they nevertheless voted for him because people like to “make history.”
Landmark (adj.) This word is often used as a noun, as in “The Eiffel Tower is an important landmark in Paris.” However, as an adjective, it means “having great importance or significance.” This always has a positive connotation, so if you tack it in front of a noun, you bring praise and acclaim to the subject.
For example, many news reports refer to the “landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling Roe vs. Wade.” In fact, as I write this passage in October 2020, the issue of abortion and “right to life” still roils American life and is a major campaign issue, so the fact that we are still debating it 43 years after the ruling shows that it is actually “the controversial 1973 Supreme Court ruling,” but that wording puts Roe in a negative light, so many media voices call it a “landmark ruling.” Also, with the idea of a “landmark” comes the idea of a “permanent, fixed item we are all proud of and use to determine our location,” so that is one more reason many in the media refer to the “landmark Roe ruling.” The idea is: “don’t touch it. Don’t even question it. It’s here forever, so get used to it.”
In May 2004 the US State of Massachusetts became the first US state to legalize marriage between two people of the same sex. (That was done by a court order, not the state legislature.) By being the first US jurisdiction to do so, and to overturn thousands of years of a Western consensus that marriage was between one man and one woman, was a huge new event. Interestingly, most news outlets did not report it as “the controversial court ruling.” Rather, they referred to “the landmark court ruling.”
- Card-stacking or “cherry picking” guest “experts” — When a journalist is assigned to report on a story, he or she may (and probably should) seek out an expert in the field that is being discussed. No one can be an expert at everything, and journalists usually cover a wide variety of topics. However, since we all–including experts–have biases (see above), a journalist can skew how his or her story comes out based on what experts he or she interviews. I once heard a panel of experts discussing some news topics. The discussion featured three anti-Trump professor “law experts” but only one Trump supporter. Although this arrangement technically “presented both sides of the issues,” the lopsided 3 to 1 ratio was unfair to Republicans. Of course, the same can be done in reverse too, where 3 conservatives could debate 1 liberal.
Another example of this I observed in August 2015. Kim Davis. (a Democrat), was a county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to couples of the same sex. That set off a political and media firestorm and eventually put Davis in jail. I was driving and listening to NPR discuss this story. They brought in one expert, a law professor somewhere. I do not remember the professor’s name or school, but I remember the gist of her comments clearly. Her argument went like this: “This is America, and in America we all have to follow the laws and enforce the laws. There is no room for individuality or divergence here. There is no precedent in American history about using our personal opinions or beliefs to differ from the group or society. We all have to obey the laws the same, no exceptions.”
(Note: NPR did not do the unthinkable and actually invite two experts, with one to defend Davis and her position. They limited it to one guest with one interpretation, so all the listeners would get one explanation.)
I do not claim to have the pedigree of a law professor as that expert did, but as a history major and licensed history teacher since 1987, I immediately recognized the historic flaws of her thinking and claims. Actually, American history is FULL of stories of dissent, individuality, and civil disobedience. It is impossible to compile an exhaustive list, but here is a tiny sampler:
- The Pilgrims who landed at Massachusetts in 1620 and gave us our American “creation story” were also called “Dissenters” and “Separatists” from the Church of England. Their whole motive to come to America was to find a place to be different and worship God in a way consistent with their conscience.
- In 1638, Pilgrim Anne Hutchinson had offended Massachusetts colonial leaders to the extent they banished her from the settlement. So, she moved south with some other families and along with Roger Williams and others helped found the colony (and later state) of Rhode Island. Granted, her banishment shows colonial intolerance, but the fact she was not executed but allowed to move away in safety shows a high level of tolerance (considering it was the early 1600s). There we see a second state-Rhode Island–founded on the basis of dissent.
- The colony of Maryland was partially founded as a refuge for Catholics. Pennsylvania was an experiment in religious toleration and diversity of thought too.
- Members of the religious group Jehovah’s Witnesses do not salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. They explain this is because they believe they belong to the Kingdom of God and such patriotic displays are tantamount to idolatry. On June 14, 1943 (Flag Day)–in the middle of WW II– the US Supreme Court ruled that schools could not force members of that group to salute the flag. The court’s majority opinion included this nugget: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion”. (source)
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and all civil rights activists who promoted equal access to voting, restaurants, bus seats, etc. all broke the laws of their day.
In short, US history is the story of dissent and individuality. If you truly want to find histories where all the masses marched to the same drumbeat, you would have to look to Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR.
- Blurring the lines between politics and the media— George Stephanopoulos for years has been a popular journalist and anchor on the ABC network. What many may not know is, he was communications director for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential election and then served as White House communications director. So, many people today may switch on their TVs expecting to get “the news” from “an unbiased source,” but not realize the person running the show is a partisan politician. I am not claiming that this fact disqualifies Stephanopoulos from his current job, but that many unknowing views are unaware of his background and worldview.
- Polls– These are allegedly to show the public’s view of certain issues and candidates. However, poll makers can help skew results by the word choice of their questions and the sample they question. Therefore, some polls do not such much reflect current public thinking, but can actually become a “news story” themselves and influence the course of an election. If polls can consistently show one candidate way behind, it can depress voter enthusiasm and contributions for that candidate, and thus influence the actual outcome of the election. (I think this is an example bias too–shortly after 2016, I added the following link to this blog, to show how wrong most of the pollsters and pundits were in their predictions of the 2016 race: Video with wrong 2016 predictions. However, a few years later as I was updating this post I realized the link was dead–click on it, and you go to YouTube and see only “Video unavailable.” As it turns out, I later found the video on a twitter account, posted here. Watch it and you be the judge. Do you think someone at Google or YouTube removed the video because they disagreed with it? Why else?)
- Headlines– People who edit the news can also skew a story by the HEADLINE they put on a story. During the Cold War, when US-USSR competition was at a fever pitch, there was a joke about a race between runners from those two countries. In the race, the American beat the Russian. However the Russian newspaper, Pravda (which in the Russian language literally means “truth,”) used THIS headline:
RACE: Russian runner comes in second, American comes in next-to-last
Technically, this headline is correct; however, it is very misleading.
In October 2019, US forces found and killed the leader of ISIS. The Washington Post went through THREE HEADLINES for this one story. What different message or “slant” does each headline give?
1. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State’s ‘terrorist-in-chief,’ dies at 48.”
2. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.”
3. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, extremist leader of Islamic State, dies at 48.”
These headlines raise many questions. Why did the editors at the Washington Post go through THREE headlines for one story? Why did only one headline call the terrorist a “terrorist,” in that case, they used quotation marks? Why did they call the terrorist leader a “religious scholar”? Why not name the religion? Why did it take outrage and mockery for them to change the second headline? You can read more in the article below:
In my Advanced Writing class, Aaron in Hsinchu, Taiwan wrote this analysis of Media Bias, and what to do about it.
In an ever-globalizing world with massive amounts of information, society inevitably falls prey to the bias of ones who prove capable of handling this deluge. These individuals usually take the form of data analysts and worse, media reporters. They skew the facts to appease their political sponsors and or use them for personal agendas. The harms of these biases on the general public cannot be more detrimental. First, skewing facts inhibit one’s ability to make informed decisions about the topic at hand. For instance, the overwhelming media bias in support of the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during WW II most likely stifled lots of productive discourse. Had Americans had the room to discuss and debate, the Japanese’s civil liberties may have not been curtailed. Secondly, media bias causes bitterness between multiple different groups of individuals. Naturally, some will subscribe to more leftist ideologies while others will lean towards the right. For these individuals, the endless media bias often confirms, or even strengthens their original views. Given this, they would probably have a harder time accepting others’ viewpoints as their beliefs are already rooted so deeply. This results in lack of engagement and bitterness: neither side tolerates each other.
With these two clear detriments, what can society do to mitigate the harm?
- When making a decision about a serious issue, try checking out multiple news outlets and be conscious of the adjectives. Do they have any particular connotations?
- Check the facts before believing anything. Check the facts. Facts.
In short, media bias is inevitable but terrible. Check the facts before making judgements. Facts.
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