Editor bias

The danger in
what you don't see

Editors are the alchemists of the news business. Their job is to take a spoonful of this, a pinch of that and mix it together with other ingredients to create our daily dose of news.

Each day the potion is different, but its effect must be the same – to give the patient the information he needs to survive another day. A large measure of wizardry is vital to the job as each patient has an opinion about how the potion should be made and the effect it should have.

To make the potions possible, editors must manage workflow, making sure that reporters know their deadlines and that supporting materials – photos, film, audio or other relevant stories – come together so that another group of editors can prepare them for display.

At each touchpoint there is the opportunity for an editor to influence a story – or for someone who has the ear of an editor to influence a story.

Editors work to strike a balance among the pressures that come from outside the newsroom, pressures generated within the news organization and the ethics of their profession. They understand the need for the organization to be profitable and to please its advertisers while attempting to shield reporters directly from those influences. They know the publisher or station manager has opinions about how the news should be covered and take those into account while attempting to make sure all points of view are represented.

And editors have opinions of their own about the role the news organization should play in the community and what their product should be. Part of their job responsibility to is exercise those opinions in the shaping of the product.

The choices editors make form the institutional voice of a medium. Editors at the New York Times make different decisions than those at the National Enquirer, but both decisions are equally important. Both teams of editors are striving to attract the largest audience possible that meets their advertisers' needs. Both teams make story selections and write headlines designed to appeal to those audiences and both work with their reporters to ensure that stories are written in a way that pleases their readers. Times editors may be more skeptical of an Elvis siting than those at the Enquirer, but both still have their standards about what merits space in their pages.

Another example of editor bias comes in the 2011 GOP race for the presidency. Comedian Jon Stewart on Aug. 15, 2011 noted that many news outlets shunned coverage of Ron Paul in favor of others. He turned the observation into a comedy bit that is certainly not balanced, but does point out the impact editors have on news reporting

As news consumers, the greatest risk we face from editors is what we don’t know. We cannot easily see the impact of an editor’s decision or know what stories they chose not to include.

Our best defense against editor bias is to get news from many sources. When we see how different organizations handle the daily flow of news, we can better understand the choices editors make and pick news providers that most meet our needs.